


Retrospect

by Tierfal



Series: A Wicked Game [4]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Established Relationship, M/M, Meet the Family, New Year's Eve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:53:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 36,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22125913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Roy and Ed are planning to spend New Year's Eve with Aunt Chris, provided that they actually manage to make it until midnight.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Series: A Wicked Game [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/372113
Comments: 79
Kudos: 587





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! It's been four years, and yet I still managed to post this late, since it's set around New Year's. Magical!
> 
> A commenter mentioned a long, long time ago (I feebly hope that you might still be out there, friend!) that the last two pieces in this series left Roy – and, by extension, the reader – in a pretty bad place. At the time, I was in a pretty bad place!
> 
> I've been meaning to add another part to this series for a really long time, but my previous sequel idea hit that anti-sweet spot of being simultaneously too nebulous and too ambitious, so I never got very far. This one isn't particularly ambitious, but I hope that it is helpful, and nicer, and fun. It's not _quite_ done yet, but I'm chipping away at it, so it should get finished pretty soon!
> 
> I wrote Wicked Game because it was a story that wanted to get told, never even beginning to dream how much it would end up meaning to other people. I am so grateful for all of you, and so humbled by the responses to it that you've shared with me over the years. It is truly incredible to be able to make things that matter even fractionally in people's lives. Thank you for joining me on so many journeys. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and your excitement and your kudos – even though I only rarely manage to articulate responses to comments, I always read them, and every single one matters to me enormously. Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading.
> 
> I hope 2020 is very kind to all of you. ♥
> 
> * * *
> 
> _And I know I don’t say anything_   
>  _But I feel everything_   
>  _I know you understand_
> 
> _Don’t cry, baby_   
>  _You’ll be the one who saves me_
> 
> – “Save Me” – Saint Motel –

They pass an extremely nice, quiet, uneventful little Christmas with Al and Winry and Winry’s grandmother up at the Rockbells’ cute, ever-so-slightly ramshackle Victorian house two and a half hours to the north. Treavisor apparently had plans with his obscenely rich progenitors, but he kindly sent presents, including an industrial-sized box of fancy coffee drinks for Roy and Ed, complete with a note saying _Win keeps telling me not to feed your addictions but it sounds like you guys might need these to survive, so I hope they’re good!_ Winry laughs until she cries, Ed sputters indignantly and then tries one and gives it a two out of five because of the dairy products, and Al says “Open mine next,” because he got Ed a shirt that says _Menace to society_. Roy gets a shirt which has an arrow and says _I’m with the menace_.

All in all, it is low-stress, low-impact, and low-heart-pounding-terror, which Roy should be taking as the red flag that it is: he’s spent all of his good luck.

“You’d think,” Maes says, managing to be uncontrollably bright and bubbly even from the other side of a laptop screen, “that bringing a one-year-old on an airplane would have ended with all of us getting flushed down the toilet and flung out into the ether—”

“Have you ever _seen_ an airplane bathroom?” Roy asks.

Ed grins. Maes ignores him.

“But she was a _perfect little angel_!” Maes says. “It was so appropriate for Christmas that I thought maybe we were going to get absorbed into a cloud!”

“Do you understand what clouds are?” Roy asks.

Ed elbows him, but Roy can tell that he’s trying not to laugh.

“Gracia was trying to look up how you can keep kids calm on flights,” Maes says. “Can you believe some parents _drug_ their children?”

“Yes,” Roy says, at the same instant Ed said, “Unfortunately.”

“Well,” Maes says, “I guess not everyone’s as lucky as we are. She does cry _sometimes_ , and I can imagine that’d get to be a pretty serious ordeal in an enclosed space like that. I wanted to put her in an itty-bitty little surgical mask so she wouldn’t have to breathe everybody else’s nasty-ass germs, but they didn’t have any that were cute enough, so…” He sighs, feelingly.

“How are the in-laws?” Roy asks.

“They’re fine,” Maes says. “Which is weird, actually, because it’s so _cold_ there that they should be icicles by now. Aren’t people supposed to retire to Florida or something?”

“Would you want to go to Florida?” Roy asks.

“At least it’d have Disneyworld,” Maes says. “Do you know how adorable Elysia would be at _Disneyworld_?”

“As adorable as she is everywhere else?” Roy says. He must sound wearier than he meant to, because Ed pats his back a little.

“Precisely,” Maes says, beaming at him. “Hey, you gotta see these pictures of her in the snow. You can barely see her face ’cause of the parka and everything, but she’s just _precious_. Hang on, let me—”

Commotion in the background distracts all three of them, and Gracia crosses the room to join Maes at the computer, bouncing a sproglet in her arms the whole way.

“Hey, beautiful,” Maes says, leaning over to kiss the closest available part of his wife, which happens to be her elbow. “Hello, Princess! Did you have a good nap?”

Elysia-sproglet appears to be more interested in trying to fit her fist into her mouth than in answering the question, although Roy supposes that it’s probably difficult to distinguish those objectives when you’ve only existed for a year.

“Elysia, look,” Gracia says, gently settling the baby in Maes’s lap instead. “It’s Uncle Roy and Uncle Ed.” Oh, sweet Jesus. Roy can’t let her make that kind of an implication—what if Ed thinks it was his idea?—but he can’t point it out without making a scene, and— “Can you say ‘hi’?” She waves to demonstrate.

The motion of Ed wildly waving back snaps Roy’s attention to him, which is also when he notices Ed’s beaming grin. “Hi, Elysia! How was the trip? Was it cold? Did you have fun?”

Roy’s staring at him, but—thinking about it—he should have anticipated this. He should have considered it, at one point or another, and realized that Ed would have a natural affinity for children. It’s an easy extrapolation from his furious, bullheaded brand of optimism—how much he believes in individuals even though he so often hates people as a entity. Children aren’t mean, or at least not on purpose. They’re odd and silly and creative and interesting, and they’re unrelentingly honest. They don’t usually start to have advanced ulterior motives until they’re most of the way through elementary school at least. They’re not naturally deceptive. And many of them like dinosaurs.

Ed has so, so, _so_ much love to give to anyone that he can trust not to hurt him.

Elysia starts to smile one of those mostly-toothless, full-faced baby smiles at Ed’s sheer enthusiasm, and Ed immediately transitions into making ridiculous faces back at her—puffing out his cheeks; crossing his eyes; and, bewilderingly, touching the tip of his nose with his tongue—until she starts to laugh and clap her tiny pudgy hands together at the show.

“Uncle Ed is a _scientist_!” Maes says, fixing his hands under Elysia’s arms to help her stand up in his lap, so that she can lean in closer to the screen. “He studies little microscopic things I don’t understand, like your Uncle Roy!”

“The concept’s not that complicated,” Ed says. “It’s just that proving stuff is slow.” Elysia holds both palms out towards the screen, and Ed extends his right back towards her. “Hi! Do you wanna play?”

The sproglet pageant continues for a little while longer, and then Gracia comments that Roy’s hair looks good, and Ed shoots him an unfamiliar look—less smug than _proud_ , possibly, but a bit of both, with a touch of almost possessive heat that ripples up Roy’s spine. It is unmistakably a _That’s my man_ sort of a look, of a caliber which a vaguely recent but unremarkable haircut utterly does not deserve.

Apparently Elysia needs to be fed soon, so Maes and Gracia ask a few more questions about the imminent trip to L.A. One of Maes’s is delivered while looking Roy directly in the eyes despite the screen and the distance between them.

“Are you going to be okay?” Maes says.

Ed goes very still.

Roy despises doing that to him. Edward Elric should never have to worry his beautiful head about anything, least of all the state of Roy’s psyche. The longer this goes on, the more that weighs on Roy’s mind. It hasn’t escaped his notice that Ed worries about him a _lot_.

“Of course,” he says. “It’s really just New Year’s Eve and then the first. We’ll be driving back pretty early on the second so that we can both get back to lab. She won’t have too much time to harass us about our life choices.”

That wasn’t really the question that Maes was asking, and both of them know it, but Roy can’t give the answer to the real question, because it’s _God, I hope so_.

“Well, hang in there,” Maes says, so brightly that Ed, who doesn’t know him very well, might not notice that this grin doesn’t put a spark into his eyes. “And don’t drive for too long at a stretch. Ed, be careful—he gets _loopy_. He makes up songs. Sometimes they’re pretty good, and it’s weird, and then while you’re distracted he eats all the road trip snacks.”

“That’s a heinous lie,” Roy says.

Maes cups a hand alongside his mouth, leans in towards Ed’s side of the screen, and loudly whispers “ _Beware_!”

Ed salutes him solemnly and then starts waving feverishly at Elysia again. “It was nice to meet you! I hope you have a good snack!”

Elysia giggles and claps again, which Roy thinks is, by and large, a very rational reaction to Ed on both counts. He is both funny and highly worthy of demonstrated approbation. Smart sproglet.

A rousing round of the _goodbye! goodbye!_ game ensues, and then they eventually manage to reach the part where they close the video chat, and Roy sits back feeling like he’s run the first two miles of a marathon that he didn’t train for.

He had a dream like that once—that he’d been signed up for a charity run without anyone ever telling him until the morning of, and he’d had to hurl himself together and book it to the starting line, and his shoes hadn’t matched, and…

Well.

That’s not why Ed’s looking at him very perceptively right now—which is overall a good thing, as it means that Ed isn’t privy to his weird dreams; but is also a bad thing, as it means that Ed is trying to figure something out.

“You said your Aunt Chris is kind of… intense,” Ed says.

“Yes,” Roy says.

Ed picks up Roy’s laptop, deposits it on the table, and shifts himself into Roy’s lap in its place. Roy’s arms wrap themselves around him, and this is… what he wants. This is always what he wants. He wants it to be _easy_ like this. He wants it to feel like the only simple thing in the wide world, and the softest thing in the universe.

“I can handle intense,” Ed says.

“I know you can,” Roy says. “I wouldn’t even have suggested it as an option if I hadn’t thought you’d take all of her… herness… in stride.”

Ed leans his head against the side of Roy’s, but Roy can tell that he hasn’t closed his eyes, because he’s still thinking. “Okay,” Ed says, calmly on the surface, but Roy can hear the gears turning underneath. Before he can try to soothe that, too, Ed’s hopping up and bumping his forehead against Roy’s in a passable impression of an affectionate cat. “I’m gonna make coffee; you want some?”

“Always,” Roy says. “Thank you.”

He’s not sure if he defused that one at all, let alone properly, and momentarily he has more to worry about: apparently Maes Hughes has been exposed to enough mutation-generating radiation up there in the wilds of Oregon to develop a psychic superpower.

The text, which arrives the _instant_ Ed’s foot crosses the threshold to the kitchenette, reads: _Oh, you’re SO hosed_.

Roy scowls at it.

Evidently Maes is not yet psychic enough to intuit that part, since no follow-up is forthcoming, which means that Roy has to do it the hard way.

_I don’t know what you’re talking about,_ he writes back, _and something tells me I don’t want to_.

Maybe he’s slightly psychic, too.

At least Maes doesn’t leave him waiting long.

_I’M TALKING ABOUT YOUR FACE!!_

Roy grimaces. Sometimes talking to Maes makes him want to throw himself off a bridge, but usually it makes him feel like that wouldn’t be fast enough.

_I have endured a lot of insults over the years, but I will admit that “you have a face like a hose” is a new one._

Since he knows he won’t stop the deluge, forcing Maes to pause and roll his eyes is about as close to a victory as he expects that he’ll get.

_You know that isn’t what I meant, nerdinator,_ Maes sends back swiftly. _I’m talking about your face when you look at ED. Especially when he was being so cute with Elysia!!!!!! I almost passed out. KEEP HIM!!!! So when are you guys going to adopt??? If you get a toddler you’ll catch up with us right off the bat and they can be playmates!!!!_

Roy presses the palm of one hand to his forehead and drags it very slowly down his face.

The lines of pixels on the phone screen haven’t changed by the time he reaches his chin.

Damn it.

It is remotely possible that briefer, more dismissive responses will slow the flood.

_It might be a good time to remind you that we’re both grad students._

_What’s your point?_ Maes writes back. _I am extremely confident that graduate students are capable of reproduction just like other species._

Roy massages his temples for a second. It is just as the prophecy foretold: a frightening percentage of conversations with Maes revolve around sproglets either specific or theoretical.

_We barely manage to sleep as it is,_ he types out, since that seems like the least-confrontational option. _And you know I’d be hopeless with kids. I don’t even want to get a puppy; I think we’d disappoint it. At least I would._

_If you keep that up,_ Maes sends back, _I’m going to go out in my backyard and throw rocks in your general direction._

_Oh, no,_ Roy writes. _Not the distant rocks. Please, not the distant rocks. Anything but the distant rocks. Think of the children. Think of the trees. Think of your fence._

Maes sends back several iterations of the meteor emoji, presumably for lack of a rock.

Then Maes writes, _So when are you getting hitched?_

Roy stares at his phone.

Then he stares at the doorway that Ed walked through about a minute and a half ago, from which the soft, indescribably comforting percolating noises of the coffee machine have begun to emanate.

Then he stares over at his laptop, the desktop background of which is a remarkably ridiculous selfie of them in lab, where Ed has both arms slung around Roy’s shoulders, and each of them has a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto (with Lime) sticking out of the corner of their mouth like an unlit cigarette. The extremely serious expressions that they managed to maintain just long enough for Roy to get the photo sometimes make him smile when precious little else seems adequate.

_Very funny,_ he texts back.

Maes sends him back an unimpressed emoji followed by many more meteors.

“Coffee’s done!” Ed calls. “You want me to make you some?”

Before Roy can answer either him or Maes, a notification for another text imposes itself at the top of his screen. In a heroic feat of multitasking, Roy gets up from the couch, taps the bubble to open the text from Alphonse Elric, and starts towards the kitchen saying, “I’ll get it. Thank you.”

As he’d expected from the words that had appeared in the preview, Al’s message is in the group text with him and Ed; and as he’d expected from _that_ , Ed’s reading it too as Roy walks over. Ed is also sipping coffee from the black-and-yellow radioactivity-symbol mug that Roy got him for Christmas, which makes the little enterprising sparrow in Roy’s heart beat its wings.

Al’s text reads _It’s Ling’s best friend’s birthday, and he promised the party would end before midnight, but I have some data I really wanted to get through tonight. I know you’re leaving tomorrow, but if I bring cupcakes can I impose on you two for a little while?_

He sent the crying cat emoji, as if it needed more modern pathos.

Ed glances up at Roy and smiles. Roy vaguely hopes now, sometimes, that he might get old; but he knows that seeing that expression never will. “I told him not to split rent with that idiot, cat-friendly place or no.”

“Think about it this way,” Roy says. “Once he sees how hopelessly bad we are at packing, he’ll probably just do it for us.”

Ed’s eyes light up. That won’t ever get old, either. “Shit, you’re right.” He puts his coffee down on the counter to free both thumbs, and momentarily a _What kind of cupcakes?_ appears in the thread.

Al must be desperate if he’s texting this fast. _Red velvet if Sherman can come too._

“Is Sherm the Worm okay?” Ed asks.

“Of course,” Roy says.

Ed sends _Deal_ and a thumbs-up.

Roy is definitely going to need some coffee now.

  


* * *

  


Unless Roy’s estimates for cupcake production are greatly disproportionate, Al must have started on the cupcakes before he sent the texts.

Al enters their apartment looking like a rather late Wise Man arriving to offer gifts to a very unconventional baby Jesus: frankincense is out, and large tupperwares of cupcakes are in. Sherman’s little harness leash is wrapped around Al’s wrist, with enough leeway for a certain very fluffy black feline to have perched on top of Al’s backpack to examine the proceedings over his shoulder.

Ed goes for the food as soon as the door has fallen shut, so Roy reaches up and pets the cat.

“You’re my saviors,” Al says, which makes Roy’s heretofore extremely bizarre mental analogy seem slightly less batty. “The first thing Ling said when people started showing up is ‘I made this epic meme playlist; we should have a singalong’.”

“You want tea?” Ed calls. Roy can hear him starting to fill the kettle without waiting for a response.

“I love you,” Al says, starting over to the couch and carefully easing his backpack off so that he doesn’t displace the cat. “Speaking of playlists, though, I hope you guys have one for tomorrow. Or some podcasts or something.”

“Don’t need ’em,” Ed says, coming back into the living room balancing three folded paper towels, each of which bears a cupcake. “Apparently if we drive for long enough, Roy will start writing music on the fly, so I can just record all his songs, and then we can sell them and get rich.”

“I think we should probably keep our day jobs,” Roy says. He settles on the couch and accepts a cupcake, because Al made them, so it will be worth it. “Thank you.”

Ed hands Al a cupcake, too, and then flops down on the couch between the two of them and puts his sockfeet up on the coffee table. Roy doesn’t know if he wears the second sock out of habit, because it makes it easier to put shoes on at a moment’s notice, or because he doesn’t want Roy to see the artificial foot more often than necessary. Roy hasn’t been able to determine yet whether starting that conversation just to say that it really doesn’t bother him would be more or less awkward than never addressing it directly.

Al takes his cupcake and then immediately raises it to over his head hold it out of Sherman’s nose-exploring and tongue-sampling reach. “What are the songs about?”

“I don’t remember,” Roy says. “It was a really long drive.” And he’d been dissociating a little, although he hadn’t known the word for it back then. “Probably at least one was about how much I hated finals.”

“Valid,” Ed says, licking cream cheese frosting off of his index fingertip like the kind of person who either isn’t remotely aware of how fucking gorgeous he is or doesn’t realize what an agony that becomes when his brother is in the room, preventing Roy from appreciating him properly.

Al sighs feelingly, scoops the cat up under the middle with his free hand, and deposits Sherman in Ed’s lap. Ed executes an absolutely identical maneuver to land Sherman on Roy instead.

“Hello,” Roy says, holding his cupcake safely aloft and stroking his other hand down the length of Sherman’s spine. He earns an ear twitch, a yawn, a brief circular exploration of his lap, and a briefer stint of painful kneading, and then he ends up with a spiral of fluff curled up on his thighs and purring quietly.

“You’re the cat-whisperer,” Ed says. He pats Roy’s shoulder and then levers himself up off the couch again. “What kind of tea do you want, Al?”

“Mint if you have it,” Al says.

They keep stock of his favorites, so Ed’s “’Kay,” is much less noncommittal than it sounds.

“Hold still,” Al says to Roy, fishing out his phone. “I’m making a collection of pictures of Shermie being cute with different people, because Winry still thinks cats are mean.” Roy does his best to look peaceful and convincing as Al takes what feels like a very long time lining up the photo. “A good shot of you in particular should help a lot.” He squints, makes a pouting-focused face almost identical to the distractingly cute one that Ed wears in lab a lot of the time, and then brightens up, beams, and lowers his phone. “Got it!”

“Why?” Roy asks, scratching behind Sherman’s ear a little.

“Why you in particular?” Al asks, and at the nod— “Because Winry really likes you.”

Roy blinks. “At risk of sounding like a broken record,” he says. “Um… why?”

Al blinks back. “To quote her verbatim: ‘One, he’s _damn_ hot—sorry, babe—and two, he makes Ed really happy.’”

Roy stares this time.

Al stares back.

Al is very good at this game.

“Oh,” Roy says. “That’s… will you tell her ‘thank you’?”

“Sure,” Al says. He scoots close enough to stroke gently at Sherman’s spine, and the cat starts to purr like a revving sports car. “Has she invited you guys to the new cabin in Colorado yet?”

Roy tries not to wince. They have not, as one might say, _come clean_ to anyone but Al, on the grounds that Al had been keeping close enough tabs on Ed’s life even from France that he would have done the math and figured it out anyway. “Um—”

“She keeps telling me to get a girlfriend so we can ‘make it a thing’,” Al says. “I keep telling her I’m only interested in sharing my bed with cats.”

“Sensible of you,” Roy says.

“That’s what I said,” Al says. “I’m starting to wonder if maybe that guy’s parents don’t want single people to come to these things because anyone who isn’t paired up might _want_ to be and might create drama or something? But it’s not like that Ling kid didn’t manage to make a lot of drama anyway, by the sound of it; and it’s not like _I_ would, so instating it as a house rule really doesn’t make the slightest bit of logical sense, besides which I’d be _happy_ to bring Sherman with me if they insisted on my plus-one as a technicality, so…”

Roy is still trying to figure out if Al just referred to Treavisor as ‘that guy’ intending to be dismissive, or if Al did it because Al has _also_ completely lost track of his actual name and is far too embarrassed to ask. Ed’s phone contact for the mystery man is _Winry’s BF_ with a little football emoji. Treavisor is the only recovering jock on the planet Earth who doesn’t have a Facebook. The longer this goes on, the direr the situation gets, because Roy’s luck guarantees that someday he’s going to get pushed into a corner and have to admit that he doesn’t have the _slightest_ idea what one of the most consequentially important people in his life is named.

“Breathe, Al,” Ed says, coming back into the room with tea. “And eat your cupcake.”

Al pauses, breathes deeply, and sighs loudly. “That’s good advice, Brother,” he says. Ed sets the mug down on the coffee table for him, and Sherman perks up at the prospect of more human food to investigate with his nose. “Are you sick?”

“Maybe Winry not inviting you has nothing to do with cats,” Ed says, squeezing himself into the tiny space between Roy and the couch arm to avoid sitting next to Al, “and everything to do with you being a _jerk_.”

“I think it’s the cats,” Al says. “But thanks for your input.”

Ed makes a strangled noise.

Roy does the only thing he can think of, which is offering Ed his cupcake.

“At least someone loves me,” Ed says.

Al sticks his tongue out.

Ed sticks his out back.

Sherman yawns cavernously and then does the little cat-loaf thing where he tucks his paws underneath himself and settles down.

“I hope you don’t have to pee,” Al says, “because now you’re stuck there forever.”

Ed pats Roy’s shoulder. “You’d better eat the cupcake to sustain yourself. I’ll bring you another one.”

“Joy,” Roy says.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finally finished this thing (for an utterly unreasonable total of 36K) a little while ago, and I just hadn't gotten around to editing and updating… but THIS WEEKEND I MADE TIME, because on Friday Husbando saw a mountain lion in our backyard, smack-dab in the middle of the day, DEFYING ITS INSTINCTS. I figured I was never going to get a clearer sign from the universe that I needed to get back to this one. XD
> 
> There's some Heavy™ in here, but nothing any rougher than the original. Just a heads up!

They start out early, in the hopes of beating the traffic on the local snarled-up tangle of highways on their way out, and then theoretically missing the complementary mess down south by the time they get there.

Al is still passed out on the couch when they leave, but since he has a key, Ed just ruffles his hair and then pats Sherman’s head and tells them both to be good. With that, they’re on their way out the door, very tall coffee mugs in hand, before it’s really light out.

Roy drives first. Ed waits until they have an open stretch of highway without any obstructions except some distant taillights glowing in the still-mostly-dark, and then he clears his throat.

“Hey,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about something. And if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s really okay, but I thought you might.”

Roy’s whole soul goes cold.

The worst thing is that he knows that it’s irrational—he knows that if Ed says something like _You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to_ , he’s the one person on the face of the planet who sincerely means it. Roy knows that Ed asks questions out of curiosity, and makes offers out of generosity, and honestly never expects anything in return. Roy knows that. Logically, he does.

But in his heart, there’s a frantic countdown towards destruction. In his heart, he _feels_ that something in him will get ripped open and pried away, and it is fucking _terrifying_ , and—

“Is there a reason you haven’t visited her in a long time?” Ed asks. “Your Aunt Chris. ’Cause you were still in lab over the holidays when I got back two years ago—I remember because you left takeout in the fridge, and you told me I could eat it, and I was arguing with you about how old it was, ’cause I didn’t believe that you hadn’t left at _all_ —but then last year, you stuck around with us at Pinako’s place. And… what Maes said. It just got me thinking, is all. But I don’t want to dredge anything up, or anything. So if it’s not a simple answer, just don’t worry about it. I figure I’ll find out pretty soon anyway, right?”

“I am,” Roy grinds out, “record-breakingly talented at not worrying about it. At not worrying about all sorts of _it_ s.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, and Roy can hear him half-grinning in a weary sort of way. “I noticed that part.”

A different countdown: so much longer, so much lower, so much worse.

Someday Roy is going to wear Ed out for good. Someday the weight of dragging him from one day to the next will simply be too much to bear. Someday he will use up the very last of Ed’s almost-inexhaustible patience.

Nothing is infinite. Nothing lasts forever. And Roy and his vortex of an internality just _take_. Ed gives and gives and gives and promises that he doesn’t mind, that it doesn’t hurt him, that it doesn’t tire him out; but someday—

Maybe someday soon—

Someday Ed is going to run out of goodwill for the sticky, clingy, consumptive, warmth-sucking, light-killing being masquerading as his boyfriend, as if a sufficiently clever costume can change the truth.

Roy never wanted to hurt him. Not ever. Not once. Roy never wanted it to come to this; never wanted to be selfish; never wanted to leave Ed feeling _lousy_ in the wake of all of the meaninglessly minor tragedies and the vastness of the sadness and emptiness and grief for things that aren’t even gone. For things that never were. For things that couldn’t have been.

Draining someone slowly is worse, in a lot of ways, than stabbing them right through the ribs.

“Partly it was bad timing,” Roy says. “There was always something I was trying to finish—a paper, or a set of experiments that got a little bit behind, or… you know how it is. And it’s a long drive to make alone if you’re not staying very long. Those were always my excuses, anyway. It’s…”

Ed’s listening. Roy doesn’t have to glance away from the road for a second to know it, and know it for sure.

Someone else could be enough for Ed. Someone else could _match_ him; could meet him halfway and make him so damn _happy_ —

Winry doesn’t know what she’s talking about—and how could she? People always play nice in public. People always act like things are great in front of their friends—smooth over the wrinkles, smear grout and spackle into all the cracks. If everything’s fine, you don’t need advice, and you’re not stressing anybody out. If everything’s fine, it must mean that you have a handle on your life. It’s not Winry’s fault that Ed doesn’t tell her the what it really is.

Maybe Ed doesn’t even know. This is his first relationship, after all. Maybe he thinks they’re all like this. Maybe he thinks—

“Hey,” Ed says, very softly. “It’s not a big deal. Just—let me know how to be there for you best. Okay?”

“She had a really rough life,” Roy says. “Chris, I mean. Objectively much harder than mine—several orders of magnitude, probably, depending on how you measure. But she didn’t… stop. She never even slowed down. She didn’t have the time to…”

_Pity herself. Let it get to her; let it gnaw at her fingertips and nip at her heels. Sink and wallow in her own misery._

“…feel bad about any of it,” Roy says. “She was just—moving on and surviving. On her own.”

“That’s what you’re doing,” Ed says.

This time Roy has to glance at him—incredulously.

“It is,” Ed says. “Shit happens, and you get through it. What’s ever happened in your life that you _haven’t_ gotten through? So—I mean, is it…” He drums his fingertips on the armrest on the door. “Does she not think depression exists in the first place, or is it that she doesn’t trust the meds?”

Roy curls his fingers around the steering wheel until the pressure starts to hurt, which at least makes for a decent distraction. “A bit of both.”

Ed’s quiet for a while, and then he says, “Do you want me to keep my mouth shut and keep the peace, or tell her where to shove it?”

In general, Ed does not believe in suffering fools. Ed does not let factual falsehoods stand; Ed does not censor himself for the benefit of a society that thrives on small talk and bullshit and fake news and social media posts that only sell the prettiest parts of anyone’s reality to acquaintances and friends. Ed does not suppress himself. Ed does not hold back.

But he would—that’s what he’s offering. He would if it would make Roy’s life easier.

Roy knew before it started that this was a terrible idea. He remembers that he knew, but he just couldn’t _help_ it, and…

And some days, _having_ Ed makes his heart ache more than yearning for him ever could. Some days, loving Ed is like carrying the sun in the center of his chest, and he knows he’s not strong enough for this.

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Roy says. “I… _really_ hope it doesn’t. And it might not. I think she knows that that’s part of the reason it’s been so long since I visited, and she does—care. She cares a _lot_. We do stay in touch, and it matters to her that we’re coming, and she—” He has to work the word around in his mouth for a second even though he knows that it’s the right one. “—loves me. She’s going to love you, too, to be honest.” It’s difficult to imagine a world where anyone could avoid loving Ed, but Roy knows for a fact that Chris will be extremely susceptible to his weird, brash, beautiful charisma. “So I’m… I hope it might not… get… messy. But—thank you. I mean that. I really do.”

Ed is quiet for a little longer, and then he says, “You never ask for anything.”

Roy can’t hear his heart beating over the engine and the road noise and the low radio, but he can feel it like his whole body’s pulsing in perfect time.

This is not a conversation they should be having in a moving car.

“You don’t,” Ed says. “You… try to do a lot of stuff to make life easier for both of us, but especially for me. You try to give me stuff that I haven’t even realized I need yet. You try to take care of me in all the little ways so that I can focus on work and science and thinking and Al and the stuff that I enjoy. You go out of your way to try to give me more time to spend on stuff that makes me happy. I know that. I see that.”

He takes a breath so deep it’s audible. Roy keeps his eyes on the road, on the road, on the road—refusing to let them unfocus; refusing to let them fixate on the windshield.

“All you ever ask for back,” Ed says, “is a little bit of help getting through the really bleak shit when you just can’t do it on your own anymore. And you don’t even really… _ask_. You sort of—you wait, and just keep struggling, and sort of… you let me help because it’s the only way forward, sometimes, and you don’t really have a choice. But you don’t ask. And I think—I think maybe that’s because you don’t think you deserve it. Maybe it’s because you don’t think you’re allowed to impose on other people, because you don’t think you’re worthy of their time. Or at least you don’t think you’re worthy of _my_ time. You think that my time’s so precious that you’re always trying to help me to have more of it, but _your_ time—and your energy, and your feelings—those don’t matter to you in the same way. You don’t think your time’s valuable because you don’t think _you’re_ valuable, and you don’t think people should invest in you, because you think you’re just going to fuck it up and fall apart on them later on anyway, so what’s the point? Because you think you’re a waste. You think your whole life’s a waste.”

Roy can’t quite see the license plate on the pickup truck three car-lengths ahead of them. He can just hear the breath rasping in and out of his throat; the headlights spark on lane marker after lane marker—little flashes in the night. The sun’s coming up. The light’s slowly brightening into a watered-down blood-red. Rosy.

“But you’re wrong,” Ed says, fiercely now. “You’re so wrong. And I don’t care how long it takes; I’m gonna prove it to you. So—so just… don’t… be afraid to tell me how I can support you. Okay? That’s what I want. I really, really want to help you get through this easier, in whatever way I can. Whatever it takes.”

There’s an old Killers song playing—Roy just threw a couple dozen high-energy numbers on a playlist so that he could plug his phone into the stereo and sustain them for most of the drive. The truck ahead is white. His fingers ache.

He wants to say _I wish I could believe you_.

He wants to say _Your heart is so big that it makes you think that other people are as generous as you_.

He wants to say _A lot of people have been kind to me in my life, but no one has ever fought for me against myself the way you do._

That would be a lot to say when his throat’s so tight.

So instead he says, “I love you,” and he hopes that the rest might be implied.

“I love you, too,” Ed says. It always sounds so easy rolling off of his tongue—so simple and natural, ordinary and extraordinary at once. Roy supposes that it _is_ easy for him, or that it’s become easy; he iterates it often, and he means it every single time. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Roy says, in part because _Fine_ has more or less been outlawed by now.

“Okay,” Ed says. “Your… hands.”

The hands in question are still clenched so tight around the steering wheel that Roy’s knuckles are visibly white even in the faint illumination of the sunrise.

“Ah,” Roy says. He tries to relax them slowly. “Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Ed says, calmly. “Hey, you know… like, if it ends up that it’s bad, we can just… leave. We don’t have to stay any longer than you’re comfortable with. Nobody can make us.”

Given the mutually-reinforcing powers of familial obligation and emotional guilt-tripping that could come into play, Roy’s not sure that it’s quite so straightforward an arrangement, but—as always, with Ed—the sentiment is unwaveringly sweet.

And it does help a little—the thought, small but significant, that he has the power to draw a line if it gets to be too much. The knowledge that someone else would stand beside him, hand in his, and say _That’s enough; we’re going_ to try to save him further pain.

“That’s a good point,” he says.

He can hear Ed’s grin, though it sounds like there’s more relief in it than anything like smugness. “Most of my points are.”

“I cannot believe,” Roy says, “that I could be so phenomenally lucky as to contain your enormous genius in my humble vehicle.”

“Yeah,” Ed says contentedly. “Pretty soon we might have to get you a bigger car. Stretch Hummer, probably.”

“Hm,” Roy says. “Is that going to be enough room for your intellect and my ego?”

“Shit,” Ed says. “Maybe we should get a yacht. You think Winry’s boyfriend’s family will give us a discount if we buy theirs?”

“I think we already owe them too much,” Roy says. “Whether or not they have the slightest idea.”

“Now _that_ ,” Ed says, reaching over to pry one of Roy’s hands off of the wheel to knit their fingers up together, “is a good point.”

  


* * *

  


One pit stop at a burger joint, one “Milkshakes don’t fall under the dairy ban because they’re basically ice cream, and they do _so_ count as brunch,” and several cumulative hours later, they’re crawling through a network of streets with familiar silhouettes. A lot of the old houses have been knocked down to nothing and rebuilt into mansions; a lot of the properties that Roy remembers being empty have coughed up brand-new apartment buildings already chipping at their cinderblock corners; but by and large it rings with all of his remembrances. Funny how you can stay away for years and not forget the route, the turns, the landmarks. There’s an oak tree that’s been hacked down that he used to use as a mile marker, but otherwise…

Otherwise, it’s almost like he never left.

It’s odd, too—how the inevitability of the patterns and rhythms of nature, of the waves and the wind through trees, always make him feel small and irrelevant in a gentle way, but the press of a city makes him feel trampled.

He’s wringing the proverbial life out of the steering wheel again as he turns into the same old driveway for the same old parking lot for the same old complex. It’s difficult to tell if the pale stucco walls of the whole building are sun-bleached any whiter than they used to be, or if it’s just been suspended in history for all this time.

There’s a parking space just outside of one of the overhangs, marked by some faded paint that used to read _VISITOR_. Roy figures that they’ll go explore in some capacity at some point tomorrow, so as long as the parking enforcement hasn’t gotten significantly stricter in the last few years, they should be able to escape without a ticket. Roy hates playing the odds with things like this—theoretically speaking, the whole leasing agency will probably be short-staffed because of the holiday, but his luck is _bad_ , and he’s stopped trying to fight it with optimism and started mentally preparing himself for every possibility instead. A fifty-dollar ticket will _suck_ , yes, but they won’t starve. One of Aunt Chris’s neighbors might be out of town and might have given her permission to use their spot, and he can move the car later. It’s fine. It’ll be fine.

Sometimes he believes himself.

He pulls the parking brake, kills the engine, and releases a deep breath that he doesn’t know how long he’s been holding.

“You sure you’re okay?” Ed says.

“I don’t know,” Roy says. The least he can give Ed is honesty, at a time like this. “But short of turning around and driving five hours back, I’m not sure I have much of a choice.”

Ed smiles at him. “Five hours isn’t very long against you feeling like shit, y’know.”

Roy takes a deep breath on purpose this time. “I don’t… think it’ll be as bad as I’m making it out to be in my head. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Ed says. He reaches out and wraps his hand around Roy’s again. “You ready to find out?”

One more. “Yeah.”

Ed squeezes Roy’s hand and then lets go so that he can open the door.

They lug their backpacks and the extra duffel bag over to the elevator, less because Roy trusts it not to malfunction and lock them inside—which might be preferable, actually, to the visit as planned—than because he doesn’t want to have to stand outside the door and catch his breath after taking the stairs.

Chris’s place—what used to be his and Chris’s place—is on the third floor, near to but not quite at the end of the row. It strikes him as strange that his old footprints aren’t worn into the cement for him to walk in.

He pocketed his keys instinctually after they locked the car. He fishes them out again, and sorts past the keys to his and Ed’s apartment to the ones that hang on their own isolated ring, like he needs the reminder. He puts the first one in the lock and turns.

The instant that he’s drawn it back out of the deadbolt, though, he hears the other lock grinding, and the door swings in and open.

“Jeez,” Chris Mustang says. “Would it kill you to text first? I could’ve been in the shower, you know.”

Roy swallows. He rummages.

“Surprise?” he says.

“C’mere, kiddo,” Chris says, and the first arm catches him around the shoulders swiftly enough to tip his balance, and from there it’s just so easy to wrap both of his around her and bury his face in her shoulder and curl his fingers into the back of her deliberately-awful sparkly holiday sweater. She smells like the same damn perfume and the same damn soap and the same damn cigarettes.

She smells like home.

“Hair looks good,” Chris says, and the shift of her shoulders to pull away leaves Roy scrambling to disentangle his fingers from the sweater. “You know we can’t have that.”

He gets no more or less warning than that before she’s shoving her whole hand into his hair to muss it up as much as possible, with the other hand still fixed on his arm so that he can’t escape.

“Thank you,” Roy manages despite the untimely death of his entire soul. “So glad we sorted that out.”

“Me, too,” Chris says. She releases him and turns her evil eagle/laser eyes on Ed, which makes Roy’s heart skitter its way through several regularly-scheduled beats. “Well. Are you going to introduce me to your strapping young man?”

Roy’s brain stumbles, searching the scattered pieces of his wit for a way to say _He’s not ‘mine’_ that sounds like respect instead of rejection.

He doesn’t make much headway, but that’s partly because Ed doesn’t hesitate: he just steps forward with a huge grin and extends his right hand.

“Hi, Ms. Mustang,” he says. “I’m Ed Elric. It’s really nice to meet you.”

“Pleasure’s all mine,” Chris says, shaking his hand. Then she turns to Roy, raises an eyebrow, and says, “Okay, ’fess up, sonny-boy.”

Despite the pertinent fact that he hasn’t done anything, Roy feels his chest clench, and he starts to sweat cold. “Wh—”

“Exactly what did you sell to Satan?” Chris asks. “Have you _seen_ this kid?”

Roy’s body is now unsure whether it wants to blush happily or attempt to implode and disintegrate. “Yes. At least once. Maybe more than that.”

Ed is biting back a laugh, so at least that’s something.

“Jesus,” Chris says. “How long have you two been a thing?”

They exchange glances, which is an old habit that won’t die despite the fact that they are, for once, in a position to tell the truth.

“It’s been about a year and a half,” Roy says.

Chris eyes them. “Sounds like you’re pretty serious.”

Roy knows without looking at Ed again that they’re both remembering the conversation that Ed had with Winry two summers back.

“Sometimes,” they say in perfect unison.

Chris goes from an expression of suspicion to one of unparalleled disgust.

“I need more coffee,” she says. “You want some?”

“God, yes,” Roy says, at the same moment Ed says, “Yes, please.”

  


* * *

  


New Year’s Eve is not a particularly special holiday when one operates an establishment that is open until two in the morning just about every night of the year, but Aunt Chris has done the bar up in sparkly steamers and all of the chintzy Party City nonsense for good measure anyway. She has a special side menu with different kinds of champagne, some of which isn’t even _total_ crap, if Roy remembers correctly.

They help her take in a delivery of food items as well as a box of new champagne flutes, most of which will likely end up broken on the floor by the end of the night.

“Thanks, doll,” Chris says to Ed as he sets one of the boxes that needs to be refrigerated on the floor in the walk-in. She’s already sweeping back out by the time he opens his mouth, but Roy gets the feeling that that’s not why Ed closes his mouth again and works his jaw.

“Sorry,” Roy says.

“Are you kidding?” Ed says, arching an eyebrow at him. “She’s gonna have to do a whole lot worse than that.”

If Roy was Ed, this nickname in particular would rankle, he thinks. Ed is never passive; Ed is the opposite of an object; Ed has beautiful, flowing blond hair and a detachable leg and a flashbomb, photo-ready grin, but he is _nobody’s_ plaything. Its weighty connotations would only ever be leveled at him by someone who has barely scratched the surface of who he is.

Ed, however, has just shrugged, let it go, and walked back out into the barroom.

After Roy has puttered around the bar for a few minutes, Ed gestures up to the dangling disco ball. “Do you think we have time to hit the hardware store and engineer a way to make that sucker drop at midnight? That’d be cool as hell.”

Roy checks his phone. “Um…”

“Oh, wait,” Ed says. “We shouldn’t move her car. We’d have to get a rideshare or whatever.”

For the drive over, they’d packed into Chris’s borderline-antique Jetta, which reeks of smoke much less than it should. She only ever lit up on the balcony at home, or with the windows down when Roy wasn’t in the car—rain or shine, although there wasn’t ever all that much of the former down here anyway.

Roy had offered to drive them all back at the end of the night, since he wasn’t planning to drink; and she’d said “Change your plans, kid”; and now they have plotted a complicated symphony involving an Uber back to the apartment after they close up shop, and for Roy and Ed to drop Chris off at her car again sometime tomorrow.

The only thing Roy wants to do less than throw liquor at his meds is to start a fight over something small, so that’s… that.

“Hang on,” Roy says. “Years ago, we…” He gets up from where he was rearranging the extra bottles stashed on the shelves beneath the counter of the bar, and beckons Ed back over to _Staff Only_ door—and then through it, and over to one of the closets. The hinges creak as he lets them in, but at least it wasn’t locked. “There were these Halloween bats we had _ages_ ago, which were on these metal tracks that went a couple feet, and they’d fake-fly back and forth…” He reaches for the step stool that used to live tucked away behind the door and finds it dusty but intact. “She never throws anything away. _Nothing_.”

“I heard that,” Chris’s voice calls from some unfathomable distance.

Roy climbs up onto the stool, appropriates an orphaned piece of cardboard, and starts poking a corner of it at the thick cobwebs near the top of the closet, trying to determine whether they’re occupied. “You could save me some time and tell me where the bats are, then!”

“Not a chance, bucko,” Chris calls back. “Suffering builds character.”

Roy sighs and prods at a black trash bag with the cardboard this time, trying to lift up a corner of it. Then he realizes how quiet it is in here and glances down at Ed.

Ed is watching him with a curious and not especially delighted expression.

“Sorry,” Roy says, more or less on instinct. “Is—”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Ed says, thoughtfully. “It’s just that… I dunno. This whole… everything about this just… explains a lot. Is this how you felt the first time you saw me with Pinako?”

“I don’t think so,” Roy says. “But it probably is how I felt the first time I saw you with Al.”

“Hmm,” Ed says.

Roy takes the neutral tone of that as permission to return to his attempts to determine if the masking tape mummifying the top of the bag—presumably as a spider-deterrent, but possibly also just to ruin his sad little life—says _HLWN_ in faded Sharpie, or if his eyes are playing tricks.

“It _is_ nice to see you up on a ladder for a change,” Ed says.

“Do you believe me now?” Roy asks, jabbing the side of the bag with the cardboard for good measure. “About how it’s less about schadenfreude and more about a really good view of your ass?”

“Jury’s still out,” Ed says, but Roy can hear him grinning.

No malevolent arachnids have come pouring out of the bag, but its contents did make a plasticky collision sort of noise when he tested them, so it’s probably worth dragging the thing down and taking a look.

By the time he’s hauled it off the shelf, Ed’s already right at his side with both arms upraised to take it from him so that he doesn’t have to jeopardize his balance.

And that’s—

What did he do?

What did he do to _earn_ this?

It just doesn’t seem—

“There’s probably more,” Roy says, handing it down to him carefully and checking the next shelf down for anything that looks like a label. “I made a habit of going to the Halloween stores on November first and buying lots of stupid crap on sale.”

“Awesome crap, you mean,” Ed says, attempting to unwind the tape, which unsurprisingly resists his efforts.

“Be careful,” Roy says. “I’m not sure all the spiders in there are gonna be plastic.”

“I’ll fight every single one of ’em,” Ed says, perfectly calmly, as he finally wrestles his way past the tape. “This looks like it’s got a little motor. Bet we can make this work.”

“I never bet against you,” Roy says. “Firstly because I’m poor, and secondly because I know better.”

Another smaller box says _HALL_ on the side—he absolutely suspects that Chris labeled things inconsistently on purpose to distress him—so he takes that one, too, and climbs down from the ladder.

Before he can even brace his feet on the floor, though, Ed is prying the box out of his hands, setting it aside on a shelf, and catching his shoulders to move him out of the way. Then Ed hops up onto the second step of the ladder and pins Roy’s shoulders again, grinning so that it sets his whole face alight.

“Hold on,” he says. “I want to know what this is like.”

Roy realizes what that means a half-second before Ed’s hands settle under his jaw to tilt his face up, which means that he’s laughing when Ed leans down and kisses him.

“Not gonna be so fuckin’ funny—” Ed is trying valiantly to keep his tone dark enough that Roy won’t hear the grin winning out beneath it again. “—when _you’re_ the one whose neck is sore for a change, asshole.”

“Isn’t that what New Year’s is about?” Roy asks. He feels strongly that he should get a medal for remaining so coherent despite how recently Ed’s tongue was moving against his. Kissing Ed has never once felt perfunctory. “Fresh experiences? Embracing change?”

“Embrace this,” Ed says, delving one hand into the hair at the nape of Roy’s neck and curling his fingers in tight; the fingers of the other slide under the collar of Roy’s shirt until the heel of Ed’s hand presses against Roy’s collarbone, and Roy has well and truly lost track of any world outside the soft, dark little universe where Ed’s mouth meets his.

Roy drags his hands down Ed’s chest, which is always an indescribable pleasure in its own right. For a split-second, he always gets to feel Ed’s heartbeat under his palm; for several less-split and rather more lingering seconds, he gets to feel the rise of Ed’s ribs and the heat of Ed’s skin under every fingertip; and when he settles those fingertips meaningfully on Ed’s belt, Ed’s breath catches every single time.

He shifts his hands now to settle them on Ed’s hips, and then he hauls inward—just hard enough that Ed stumbles; not enough that his balance goes; just enough that Ed tips forward against him, and their bodies collide, and Ed shivers and then bites Roy’s bottom lip as a very unconvincing reprimand.

Roy likes the unusual opportunity to look up at him, even if it isn’t particularly far. He sneaks quick glances through his eyelashes; takes little breaks to breathe and uses them to gaze up at the ever-so-slightly altered contours of Ed’s face. He tries to stop his hands from drifting, but he is only a man, and they know what they like, and they know what every other part of him likes, too.

Judging by the way that Ed grinds against him for a second when Roy’s hands settle on his ass, though, the gesture is not exactly interpreted in a way that one would characterize as offensive.

“Hmm,” Ed says, breathing it against Roy’s mouth with his eyelashes so low that Roy’s guts clench tight and hot and hungry. “You sure this is a good idea, Mr. Mustang?”

“No,” Roy says with the faint current of steam that remains of his speaking voice. “Not sure I give much of a fuck, though.”

Ed laughs, which makes him more beautiful; and leans his forehead against Roy’s from that slight upward angle; and smiles as he lays one hand on Roy’s waist and strokes the thumb of the other slowly up and down the side of Roy’s neck. “How much? Ten percent of a fuck? Fifteen?”

“Five,” Roy says. “Maximum.”

Ed is now trying not to laugh, which is on the cuter side of gorgeous, as far as his expressions go. “Y—jeez. That’s—not very much of a fuck. That’s a really small—how did you calculate that?”

Roy squeezes Ed’s ass, which is, truly, in and of itself a reason to live. He has a list. It’s not transcribed anywhere, in large part because this is on it, but he shuffles the order of the items around some days.

“Mm,” Roy says. “Complicated. Math is—” He rolls his hips against Ed’s; grins at the shudder and the hitching exhale. “—hard.”

Ed is now trying not to laugh and trying not to moan at the same time. Roy learned how to summon that combination by way of extensive experience. It’s among his favorites. “Get fucked.”

“Yes, please,” Roy says.

Ed leans his head harder on Roy’s, rubbing their foreheads together for a second; his eyes have slipped shut, and he’s biting his bottom lip, and Roy just wants to live in this quick-blooded, hot-skinned, seething, soothing, surreal little moment for the rest of—

“Boys,” Aunt Chris says, loudly, rapping her knuckles against the door three times before her footsteps start retreating down the hall. “Don’t make a mess.”

Roy still has both hands on Ed’s ass.

They draw back enough to stare at each other for a second, blinking, as if blinking is going to have any effect on the unavoidable fact that that just happened.

“Uh,” Ed says. “I don’t know her yet. Was that shaming, or was it permission?”

“Both,” Roy says.

“Shit,” Ed says. “You _are_ related.”

Roy feels his nose wrinkling and is powerless to stop it. “Thanks. Or something.”

Ed’s hand curls around the back of Roy’s neck to pull him in for one more kiss—a quick, sweet, closed-mouthed little apology more than anything, but Roy will treasure this one, too.

“Hold that thought for later,” Ed says, hoping down off of the step. “Well—not that one. Not the one about being related. One of the ones from right before that. Hang on to that one, and for now let’s go jury-rig some cheap electronics and try not to die.”

“That is the least-terrifying sentence I have ever heard,” Roy says. “Scout’s honor.”

Ed shoves the box at him, grinning again. “Good.”

  


* * *

  


Unsurprisingly, Ed is making visible progress on his mad scientist holiday upcycling project well before Roy has made visible progress scrubbing the surface of the bar. On the upside, scouring a few stubborn liquor stains that last night’s wipe-down didn’t catch seems significantlyeasier these days, with several years of experience using various industrial bleaches to clean lab benches before any stray experimental detritus takes over the world.

Ed has picked up the disco ball that is apparently destined to preside over the celebrations tonight. Roy glances up in time to see him turning it over in his hands, and in time to hear him say, “Hmm.”

Roy puts the rag down. “That sounds like the bad ‘hmm’.”

“I don’t think it’s safe to put a hole through the middle of this thing,” Ed says, blinking down at it from above, “besides which it’s not mine, so that wouldn’t be right, anyway. And I dunno if we could turn up a dowel rod from your magic closet for it to fit on. So… Plan B.”

Roy dodges around the edge of the bar and comes over to examine Ed’s progress with the bat mechanisms. “What’s Plan B?”

“I have no idea,” Ed says. He holds the ball up over his head. Seeing tiny fragments of him reflected in the little mirrors is fascinating, but if Roy leans in closer, he’ll be visible in them, and that’s not nearly as good. “That’s where you come in.”

“Is it?” Roy says. “Oh, dear.”

Ed grins at him. “You’re good at shit like this!”

Roy sorts through a few of the pieces that Ed has been meddling with. “Do you mean writhing in anxiety, crumbling under pressure, or getting tangled up in fishing line and pulleys?”

Ed elbows him, but not very hard. “You know exactly what I mean. Maybe if we… like, if the pole it’s on is _really_ thin. It doesn’t have to free-fall to drop or anything, does it? That’s not in the rules.”

“Oh, Lord,” Roy says. “There are rules?”

“Well, fuck the rules,” Ed says. “The only rules I care about are gravity and thermodynamics and… okay, there are a few, but the laws of man invented to govern stupid New Year’s Eve crap definitely aren’t on my list.”

Roy realizes that he’s just sort of smiling beatifically in a way that probably looks moderately deranged to the untrained eye, but Ed has that effect on him sometimes.

Watching Ed fuss around with the ball a little more and mutter about it and the laws of man and other things that are really not worth driving five hours for—Ed doesn’t say that part, but it’s the damn truth—sets Roy’s mind wandering off into weird little corridors full of hinges and springs and air-jets with sufficient force to make objects look like they’re levitating, and…

“Do we have to use a stick at all?” he asks. “Is that in the rules? Or could you just… rig it to lower itself slowly until it reaches a certain point?”

Ed stares at him for a second, and then at the mechanisms that he’d halfway taken apart, and then back at Roy.

Then he grins.

“Told you,” he says.

Roy blinks.

“You’re good at problem-solving,” Ed says. “You’re the only one who doesn’t think that.”

Roy makes a face at him. “It’s still not much good if I can’t execute the idea.”

“You don’t have to,” Ed says, picking up one of the little screw-in wall hooks that was bundled in with the bat stuff, and gingerly applying the threaded end to the top of the ball. “You can just sit there and look pretty while I figure it out.”

“That part I might be good at,” Roy says.

“Thought you might say that,” Ed says.

“Watching you beat things into submission with your genius stick is a privilege,” Roy says. “Did you think I would say that?”

Ed stares at him a little. “No. I—no. Shit, can I have that on a T-shirt? ‘Time to beat things into submission with my genius stick’? Holy shit, Roy.”

“Christmas is only three hundred and fifty-some days away,” Roy says. “Maybe if you’re very good this year—”

“Fuck you,” Ed says, but he’s already laughing.

Roy maintains the most neutral face he can. “Maybe if you do a lot of _that_ this year—”

Ed shoves him, but not very hard.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's some stuff (not a lot, but it's there) in this chapter about what happens when members of your family sometimes belittle you _because_ they love you, which is complicated and messy and may be especially difficult for some people to read right now. Please take care! ♥ This fic isn't going anywhere, and I'm going to post a bunch of other stuff this weekend, so if that sounds like it might be tough for you right now, please just save it for later. c:

Ed really is the living embodiment of a miracle in the smaller things as well: when he sits down and commits to something, his enterprises tend to time out right.

In this case, for instance, shortly after they’ve started testing their ungodly décor brainchild, the door opens, and three silhouettes that Roy had _almost_ begun hoping that he wouldn’t see step into the doorway.

“Run,” Roy says.

Ed is still squinting into the sudden illumination. “What? Who—”

“Too late,” Roy says. “We can try standing very, very still, and maybe they won’t see us.”

“Your cougar psychology didn’t even work on the real cougar,” Ed says. “What—”

“ _Roy_!” Must be very bright out there; the shrill scream of recognition took a lot longer than he expected. “Look at you, babycakes! I thought Mom was joking when she said you’d come!”

Roy _feels_ more than he sees Ed’s eyes light up with demonic inspiration at the very old, very tired, very nonsensical nickname; and then he senses Ed’s face contorting in confusion at ‘Mom’.

Damage control first, explanations later. That’s usually the best strategy anyway.

“This is exactly why I don’t visit,” Roy says—or starts to say, since the last two syllables are cut off when a bangle-weighted arm flings itself around his shoulders and slams his throat directly into a sharp collarbone. That is another reason why he doesn’t visit: the hugs hurt.

Before he’s managed to gasp in enough air to sustain higher brain function, let alone to protest, there are two other sets of arms wrapping around him in what feels more like an inefficient smothering than a group hug, though he supposes intentions should count.

“So are you avoiding us, or what?” Maddie says.

“Maybe he’s avoiding Mom,” Ari says. “We’re just collateral damage. We’re not _important_ enough—”

“Wait,” Vanessa says, drawing back, and at last Roy can choke in a little bit of oxygen.

He’s going to need it, since it comes with an immediate adrenaline chaser.

“Who’s _this_?” Vanessa asks.

“Hi,” Ed says, shoving his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels, and then realizing that he needs to extract a hand to offer handshakes, at which point he fumbles to get the right one out of his pocket again. “I’m Ed.”

All three of the eagle-eyed harpies fix their sights on Roy for an incredibly harrowing second, and then they swing around in unison to stare at Ed again instead.

“You have a _boyfriend_?” Vanessa asks.

“Will you just shake his hand already?” Roy says. “You’re going to make him nervous.”

Ari leaps forward first, seizing Ed’s hand in both of hers and pumping vigorously. Roy wants to die more than usual. “Hi, Ed! I’m Arianna! Do you know what you’re getting into?”

“Thanks,” Roy says.

“Yeah,” Ed says, and the calmness of his voice and the steadiness of his grin makes Roy’s heart so weak and mushy that he’s not sure he’ll last out the day without some serious cardiac distress. “Nice to meet you.”

“I’m Vanessa” comes next, complete with elbowing Ari out of the way, and followed by “Although Roy has been known to call me the Loch Ness Monster when he’s being a brat.”

Ed bites his lip very hard. Roy would like to be saving him the trouble and biting it for him, anywhere in the world but here. “Nice to meet you, too.”

A chirpy “I’m Maddie!” rounds out the trio, followed by “He’s never, _ever_ brought anybody except Maes over here before. Are you guys engaged?” She gasps, grabbing Ari’s arm. “Are you _already married_? Shotgun wedding in Vegas on your way down? Hang on—Roy, show me your hand—”

“We’re _not_ married,” Roy says. “And if I had a shotgun—”

“Shut up,” Maddie says. Before he has a chance to feign offense, she slings her arms around Ed and hauls him in against her chest. “Welcome to the family, babycakes’s babycakes!”

Ari pats Roy’s shoulder. “You know, the upshot is that you’re surrounded by hard liquor that you can drink for free.”

Nothing’s free. “Thanks. Maddie, can you please let go of him?”

Maddie has just started petting Ed’s hair, which has shaken the careful neutrality off of Ed’s expression, in favor of helpless uncertainty. “He’s so _cute_! Where did you find him?”

“Lab,” Roy says. Ed half-smiles. “With one hand in my Chinese takeout.” Ed frowns.

“Damn it,” Maddie says, stroking Ed’s head one more time before finally releasing him. “Are you telling me that I have to commit to getting a PhD if want my own babycakes?”

Ed makes a valiant attempt to clear his throat. “I… it’s… probably a mistake to ask, but… what the hell is a babycake?”

“I’m the youngest,” Roy says, “and when I was eight, I wanted to be a baker when I grew up, and it… stuck.”

“But look at you now!” Ari says, clapping him on the shoulder this time. “All grown-up and good-looking and sciencey-smart with a hot blond hanging off your arm—”

“Uh,” Ed says, although Roy’s not even sure which part of that was the most objectionable at this point.

“Back and slumming it with your little old family—” Ari’s Apple Watch beeps loudly. “Oh, shit, we open in, like, half an hour. Where’s Mom?”

“Kitchen, I think,” Roy says, “but don’t quote me.”

Each of them smacks Roy’s shoulder again on their way past him. He’s going to have a bruise.

When the chattering hurricane has disappeared into the hall, Ed turns to Roy, blinking. “What… what _was_ that?”

“They were all on the street in different places before they met Chris,” Roy says. “She gave them all jobs and let them live here and fed them and helped them get back to school a little even though she never officially adopted any of them. So… you know.”

Ed does, and will. Ed understands what _family_ really means, when you get down to the bones of it.

“Huh,” Ed says. “Makes sense, actually. You don’t _quite_ act like an only child, but then sometimes you sorta do. It’s because you kinda split the difference.”

“Guess so,” Roy says. He steps forward, reaches out—

And there is a part of him, every time he thinks about it, that expects Ed to move away.

“Are you okay?” he asks. Ed is wearing a frizzy halo from all of the mostly-well-intentioned abuse. Roy tries to flatten it as well as he can without spitting into his hand. “They’re… a lot. That was a lot.”

“C’mon,” Ed says, grinning. “You’ve met _Winry_. This is kid stuff.”

Roy transitions from trying to tame the frizz to trying to map the precise curve of Ed’s jaw with his fingertips. “Still.”

Ed is smiling up at him, and as much as Roy did genuinely enjoy the moments on the stepladder, this is the image that he wants imprinted on the surface of his brain, and possibly tattooed on the inside of his wrist—somewhere he can pull back his sleeve and re-experience it any time he needs to.

“Don’t worry about me,” Ed says. “Really don’t. I can handle it.”

“Mm,” Roy says, more to light the spark in Ed’s eye than anything else. “If you’re well-behaved, I’ll handle _you_ later.”

Ed’s pupils dilate.

Then he busts up laughing.

The way that he smiles with so _much_ of himself—the way that it changes his eyes and his cheeks and his shoulders and his spine, the way that it rolls through his whole body and illuminates him—makes it impossible for Roy to keep his grasp on anything like self-control. He leans down and grazes his mouth over Ed’s, lightly at first, to provoke Ed’s instinct to push up on his toes to meet Roy with more force. That feeling isn’t just terrific; it’s transcendent. The way Ed rises up into him—

“Keep it PG in here, gentlemen,” Chris says.

Before they’ve even separated, Maddie adds, “Or don’t!”

Ed blinks, squints, and then lifts his hand to lay the side of it against Roy’s cheekbone.

“You’re blushing,” he says.

“It’s the lights,” Roy says. “The ones in here have always had red undertones.”

Ed grins. “Like _hell_ , you _liar_.”

Roy catches his wrist before he can withdraw his hand, holds it still, and kisses Ed’s palm before he lets go. “Worth a shot. Decoration-o-rama continues.”

Ed eyes some of the shiny stuff already plastered up around the big TV over the bar and keeps his voice low. “Aren’t people going to be too drunk to care?”

“That would be my argument,” Roy says, “but apparently ‘It’s the principle of the thing’.”

“Ah,” Ed says. “Yes, of course. The sacred principle-of-the-thing. How could I forget?”

“Nobody’s perfect,” Roy says, which is actually very funny, considering who he’s saying it to.

  


* * *

  


A grand total of zero customers have set foot on the premises before five, which Roy thinks is a good thing, as far as a barometer of the local humanity; although it’s probably a bad thing as far as profit margin. It’ll likely fill up later. It’ll likely fill up about as much as he can stand.

The quiet gives him time to catch up with Ari, though, who regales him with a fairly long and hilariously dramatic retelling of her most recent breakup. Evidently the techbro who sold himself as some kind of knight in shining armor later revealed himself to be more of a Grima Wormtongue, which ended so badly that Ari had to dump him very spectacularly in the middle of a fancy restaurant.

“I should have known better,” Ari says, making a point of flinging an arm over her eyes before slumping against the bar, which gives it a sort of alcoholic-Scarlett-O’Hara vibe. “If their hearts are gold, they’re dumb as a bag of rocks. If their brains are silicon, the rest is slag.”

Roy swirls the ice around in his water glass. “Did you practice that?”

“Of course I did,” Ari says. “I have to be ready to get into a rap battle with that fucker if I ever run into him on the street. You want to help me find a good rhyme for ‘compensating’?”

“Yes,” Roy says.

He tries never to forget for a single moment how impossibly lucky he is. Ed is the whole package—the real deal. Ed is everything, no questions asked; no compromises.

Speaking of which—

“So,” Ari says, having recovered from her fainting spell enough to waggle an eyebrow. “Does your babycakes have a brother, or…?”

“He does, actually,” Roy says. “I think Al’s much more interested in cats and translational medicine than in dating, but I can give him your number in case he ever decides that he wants to give it a try.”

“Typical,” Ari says, rolling her eyes instead now. “All the good ones are either taken or asexual.”

“Your life is an unrelenting tragedy,” Roy says.

Ari grins at him. “I _know_ , right?”

  


* * *

  


People start trickling in around five thirty—few enough, at that point, that Roy ends up playing an old time-passing game that he never really liked, which involves making up reasons why patrons are here instead of at home. Most of their imagined stories boil down to loneliness. Roy has never blamed them for that.

He frequently looks at Ed and has to remind himself that this is not a joke, or a trick, or a dream. He had more or less resigned himself to the prospect of staying married to his lab work and eschewing family and most of his friends until… well, he hadn’t really gotten to an _until_ that sounded rational. He’d had extremely vague intentions to “get better” someday, in such a meaningful way that he’d feel enthusiastic about reaching out along old emotional conduits to remind people of his existence, and to show them how much he’d done.

He is better than he was before the fateful trip—not because he’s had some sort of dramatic change in serotonin production; not because some switch has flipped, and the power of True Love fires a deluge of endorphins daily through his brain; but because he’s better supported. In addition to being his boyfriend, Ed is his _best_ friend. Ed is at his side and endlessly patient and too good a human being to fake being glad to see him, which means that he must be genuinely happy that Roy’s around. Ed helps him focus and helps him fight it. Ed waits out the bad days with him. And Ed curls three limbs around him when they climb into bed and leeches his warmth and mumbles things like _Y’know, I don’t think I ever wanna talk theoretical physics with anyone but you_.

Ed has weathered a lot of storms with him already, but Ed has never once complained about the rain. Ed makes him laugh, including and especially on days that he’s not sure he’s capable of it.

Ed is currently getting billiards lessons from Maddie, who has crushed so many dreams in this very room that Roy has no doubt that Ed’s going to come out on the other side of this ready to annihilate his opponents.

A large group bursts through the front doors—Roy counts six, then eight, then ten; and hears the tail end of a “No, they serve food here! It’s not bad!”

That’s his cue to get up, circle around the edge of the bar, toss his water glass into the bussing in, and roll up his sleeves.

Chris grins at him, the now-trademark unlit cigarette tipping up at the corner of her mouth.

“Missed you, kid,” she says.

“I missed you, too,” he says, and he means it.

  


* * *

  


The customers keep his hands busy—drinks are good; darting back and forth to help Vanessa in the kitchen helps, too. They don’t serve anything fancy, but the fries are good, and the sliders are good, and they have one or two hilariously misplaced salads advertised on the little laminated menu cards. Everything is laminated around here—the options never change much, and it’s a godsend in the endless war against soggy paper.

The next time that Roy gets a few good moments to spare, it’s closer to six, and Ed has wandered back over to the bar and hopped up onto one of the stools at the far end, mostly out of the way.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Roy says, sauntering over and leaning an elbow on the bar. He bats his eyelashes for good measure, which makes Ed grin. “What can I get for you?”

“Do you have anything with caffeine in it?” Ed asks. “Jeez. Staying up until midnight used to be _easy_.”

“We have Dr. Pepper,” Roy says. “Although it’s probably the sugar that’ll keep you up.”

“I’ll take it,” Ed says. “Can I leave you weird stuff as a tip?”

Roy blinks at him. “It… I wish it was the first time I’d gotten that question. ‘Weird’ how?”

Ed looks Roy directly in the eyes as he reaches up behind one of his own adorable ears and smoothly extracts a… small plastic bat wing.

He lays it on the bar, slides it forward, and sits back looking very pleased with himself.

“Salvaged from the carnage,” he says. “Just for you.”

“I must have been very good this year,” Roy says. “When did you take up sleight of hand?”

“Third grade,” Ed says. “I usually forget about it for five to seven years at a time and then get bored for a couple minutes and try it again. So how about that sweet, sweet, high-fructose-corn-syrupy caffeine?”

“Coming right up,” Roy says, and then he picks up the bat wing. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Put it in your shirt pocket,” Ed says. “Carry it close to your heart.”

In the interests of preserving the sheer ridiculousness of this conversation for a few moments more, Roy does exactly that, with the single solemnest facial expression that he can muster. He pats his pocket.

“Safe now,” he says. “I’ll treasure it forever.”

“Best tip ever,” Ed says. “You’re welcome.”

“Truly,” Roy says, heading over for the mini-fridge packed full of soda cans, “I am blessed.”

  


* * *

  


Roy knew that he was screwed from the minute that he stepped behind the bar, but he’d dared to hope that he might at least manage to have the inevitable conversation out of Ed’s earshot.

No such luck.

No luck of any type tonight, evidently.

Everybody sitting at the bar has drinks; everybody sitting at the tables has drinks; Maddie is off flirting with a guy who came alone; there’s nowhere to hide and no distractions to point to, and Ed’s still sipping at his soda. Roy definitely, absolutely, indubitably did not give him a straw for the specific purpose of getting to watch him play with it with his tongue, move it around his mouth, and hollow his cheeks out when he sucks on it.

Roy knows it’s going to be a long night. He’s only a man.

He is now only a man silently begging the floor beneath him to open up and devour him whole so that he doesn’t have to endure this, and Ed doesn’t have to get involved.

“Hey, kiddo,” Chris says, one hand settling on Roy’s shoulder—a rather familiar jovial threat. He’s trapped. “Last time we talked, you said you were almost done with your project, so you’d be finishing up that whole thesis business pretty soon.”

“Yeah,” Roy says. He can feel it—the weight of what’s to come. It drags on every single fiber of his being. The mantle of terror is heavy, and it’s cold. “Sometime this year. I’m hoping it’ll all be said and done by summer, maybe.”

It’ll have to be; his fellowship is running out, and the tuition rate’s much lower now that he’s nearly out of the woods, but he doesn’t know if the lab can afford to keep him if he’s not paying his own way. It would be illogical to oust a grad student on the cusp of defending, but he’s sure it’s happened before. He can’t count on a safety net. He doesn’t have a choice outside of self-sufficiency.

“As soon as I get a date set,” he says, which is a feat of faculty-wrangling that he dreads almost as much as he was dreading this discussion; “I’ll let you know.”

“Perfect,” Chris says. “Can’t wait to sit in the middle of the room and hold my giant foam finger up and cheer every time you advance a slide.”

Ed grins. This is presumably because Ed thinks she’s joking.

“So,” Chris says. “What are your plans for after that?”

Roy’s heart beats—thuds? It thuds. It drops, repeatedly, in an enclosed space.

He’s always known that he’s a coward, but he supposes that looking at one of the glassware shelves underneath the bar to avoid looking at Ed probably qualifies as a new low. “Probably see if I can get an industry job. I’ve been trying to watch the market a little bit. Emailed a couple people who used to be in our lab to ask how they liked theirs, and it sounds okay.”

“Jeez,” Chris says. “Dial it back, there. Don’t sound so thrilled about the rest of your life.”

She’ll figure it out later. The fact is that he needs to start getting paid real money pronto to pay off the loans and help sustain Ed through the rest of his degree. _The rest of his life_ makes for a nice, pretty-sounding concept, sure; putting food on the table tomorrow matters more.

“What about you, doll?” Chris asks Ed, and Roy looks up in time to see Ed clearing the last traces of a slightly puzzled expression from his face.

“I’m not quite sure yet,” Ed says. “I dunno—I really like teaching, and I really like research, so I’m thinking about academia, I guess. Maybe try to get a postdoc and see if I still like it all enough to try for a faculty position or something. But it’d have to be local, obviously, so… we’ll see.”

Continuing to look at Ed—earnest, open-hearted, bright-eyed Ed—is much easier than facing the expectant expression that he knows that Chris will be pointing in his direction. Ed basically just said _I’m counting on us being together for the foreseeable future, so of course we’ll work around each other and make some sacrifices if we have to_. Ed thinks that it’s ordinary—a love like his; a love so toweringly strong and supportive that even Roy couldn’t tear it down if he tried. Ed thinks that everyone is like him; Ed thinks that everyone gives themselves away and doesn’t even hold a grudge. Ed thinks that that’s how life works. Ed thinks that that’s how people are. Ed doesn’t think that that’s anything particularly special—doesn’t think that _he’s_ special. Ed certainly doesn’t think that he’s the most wonderful fucking person in the world.

Roy does.

And it kills him, some days, to stand here wreathed in his own endless mediocrity, soaking up the warmth.

“Huh,” Chris says. “Guess you two are pretty serious.”

Roy starts working on a prayer to whatever deity might inhabit the floor. If he begs prettily enough, will it consume him? Surely pleading wouldn’t hurt.

“I guess,” Ed says. Roy chances a glance; Ed’s playing with the straw between his fingers, looking much more like he’s thinking than like he wants to die. “I don’t get why people say it like that, though—I mean, if you really care about somebody, it starts out pretty serious, right? ’Cause it matters to you right from the get-go that the whole thing goes well. It’s kind of hard to imagine dating somebody as a joke and then having it wind up serious on accident.”

Roy can’t help staring at him this time. Setting aside the fact that he’s not sure that that’s the point of the idiom, that’s very nearly what they _did_.

“Whatever,” Ed’s saying. “Roy’s, like, sixteen times better a roommate than anybody else I’ve ever met except my brother, who likes cats too much and bakes at three in the morning sometimes, which is when I’m trying to do stuff with my data, and then I end up eating instead of working. So far, so good. So far, _really_ good. If that’s what ‘serious’ is supposed to mean, then… I mean, yeah. I’m pretty serious about doing what I can to keep it going for as long as we both feel like that’s the right thing to do.”

Roy has not managed to process a single one of the ten-thousand half-formed emotions that just twined up into a hurricane inside his head before Chris’s arm slings around him more fully this time and shakes him gently.

“Look at you,” she says. “You keep him all to yourself all this time so that your sisters wouldn’t try to steal him, or what?”

“Yes,” Roy says, despite the obvious fact that that has nearly nothing to do with it. “I’m still very concerned about the potential of one or all of them staging a kidnapping, actually, so if you see any of them acting suspicious—”

“How would I be able to tell?” Chris asks.

Vanessa’s head appears around the doorframe that leads into the barroom. She looks very distressed and has what appears to be a smudge of char on one cheek.

“I just _had_ to ask,” Chris says. “Can you handle it?”

She’s trying to get rid of him. Dastardly woman. There was never any doubt as to whence the brutal combination of nature and nurture originated, obviously, but he does sometimes wish that she’d bequeathed him with more of it.

“Sure,” he says, because he has to, and then he’s off.

  


* * *

  


Contrary to appearances, Vanessa has not actually set anything on fire yet, which could mean that they may yet all survive this night unscathed. Or unburnt, at least. Roy thinks that he’s already been scathed a bit, and he imagines that he has quite a bit more in store.

He’s not sure if the food-handling training that he took approximately a decade ago—give or take a handful of years—still qualifies him in the watchful eyes of the FDA, but he figures that in this case, it’s better not to ask than to get an answer that makes the thing that he’s going to do anyway both stupid and slightly illegal. In lab, it’s always the other way around, so it’s a refreshing change of pace, if nothing else.

“You haven’t eaten yet, have you?” Vanessa asks after he’s plated up a variety of dishes, set them on the hotplate, allocated their respective receipts to them, and mapped out the most efficient delivery route in his head.

“Don’t tell me,” Roy says. “You guys got fast food on the way over and didn’t even _ask_ Babycakes if he wanted some fries.”

“I’ll make you and your cake-baby something special,” Vanessa says, waving a spatula towards herself slowly like a Southern belle with an extremely inefficient fan.

“I hope that was intended to sound like a threat,” Roy says, peeling his gloves off before he loads up the tray so that no one sees them and panics.

“What kind of big sister would I be if it didn’t?” Vanessa says. “You can let Ed know that his name is ‘cake-baby’ forever now.”

Roy plays some plate Tetris and hefts the tray. “I’m sure he’ll be so thrilled that he’ll start begging to come for Christmas next year. And Thanksgiving.”

“Goody,” Vanessa says. “No one ever eats my mystery sweet potatoes. We need new blood.”

“Unexpectedly,” Roy says, starting for the barroom again, “you managed to make it worse.”

“I am a well of untapped talents!” Vanessa calls after him, which makes it an even better time to leave before she starts enumerating them.

Dishing out all the dishes and then returning to help her bargain with their extremely manipulative deep-fryer doesn’t kill quite as much time as he’d hoped. Worse still, every time he sneaks a glance over at Ed and Aunt Chris, they’re deep in conversation, but he can’t tell what _about_.

“Shoo,” Vanessa says once he starts into the kitchen for the fourth time. “This is for you and cake-baby. I want it to be a surprise.”

“I’m going to have nightmares,” Roy says. “Are you sure you’re—”

“Fine, yes,” Vanessa says. “Go! Go on! Have some fun! How many times do I have to say it? What’s wrong with you?”

“That’s an essay,” Roy says. “Or at least a blog post.”

“Eew,” Vanessa says. “Go make sure Mom hasn’t traumatized your boyfriend.”

“I wish that wasn’t such a good argument,” Roy says, and he pretends not to hear her overstated sigh of relief as he goes.

The good news is that by the time he makes it back to the bar, Ed has been collected by Maddie again and dragged off to the other end of the room to learn how to play darts for money. Maddie doesn’t play anything for sport, which changes the rules a bit; but she still technically plays for fun, because robbing unsuspecting competitors blind is her favorite hobby. She’s also dug up a truly ridiculous New-Years-ready sequined silver top hat, which is refracting light all over Ed’s face as he turns a dart around in his fingers, likely trying to make calculations about its aerodynamics.

The bad news is that this leaves Roy alone with Aunt Chris.

“Siddown, kiddo,” she says. Despite the fact that Californian law prevents her from lighting a cigarette indoors, she has, as always, tucked one into the corner of her mouth, like it might just ignite itself at any moment to complete her aesthetic. “What can I get for you?”

“I’m okay,” Roy says. He has no choice except to sit: familial imperative pulls his limbs, moves his feet, and shifts his weight without his permission. “But thank you.”

“I thought Vanessa was cooking for you,” Chris says.

“That’s what I hear,” Roy says.

Chris cocks an eyebrow. “Are you sure you want to experience that sober?”

Roy is about to gesture outward and refer to all of the other people who are eating Vanessa’s food without complaining before he remembers where they are.

“Well,” he manages, trying not to let the pounding of his pulse in his throat start to strangle him, “not… really, but I’m not—”

“Live a little, for heaven’s sake,” Chris says. “I got a great fancy vodka the other day. Couldn’t resist when I saw it. Haven’t even opened it yet. Do a shot with your old Aunt Chris for good luck next year. What do you say?”

The pounding has intensified into a thundering. “I—I really just—”

Chris sets an elbow on the bar. “Spit it out.”

Roy clenches his teeth so hard for a second that his head hurts. She isn’t giving him a choice. He hasn’t done anything wrong. He _hasn’t_.

“I’m not supposed to drink on my medication,” he says.

He knows what’s coming. He’s known what’s coming since she texted him the invitation; he’s felt it prickling at the back of his neck since they got into the car. He tries to brace himself, but it won’t help much—won’t matter. It never does.

“Roy,” Chris says slowly, leaning harder on her elbow, one eyebrow arching, mouth in a thin line— “Do you really think your sugar pills are suddenly going to kill you if you have one measly drink?”

Roy swallows. He blinks. He tries to smile in an appeasing sort of way. “No, but they can interact. Sometimes side effects—”

“Listen,” Chris says. “You’re going to have your whole damn life to follow the rules to the letter. Save that shit for when you get old. Have a single, solitary drink with your surrogate mother on New Year’s Eve, for Chrissake.”

Roy draws a deep breath and lets it out carefully. A lot of the reason that he hasn’t felt young in a long, long time is that he learned how to pick his battles as a child.

“If it’ll make you happy,” he says, “I’ll have _one_.”

He knows it won’t be one, but if he can get her to commit to that, he might be able to keep it under three. His tolerance isn’t what it used to be.

“Manipulative little bastard,” Chris says, grinning around the cigarette. “That’s more like it.”

“Learned from the best,” Roy says.

She knows she has the upper hand, but she also knows that he can be stubborn as all _hell_ when the chips are down, so she pours the shots really damn fast, pushes his across the bar to him, and hefts her glass before he can try to change his mind.

He wouldn’t. He’s made his choice, and he intends to follow through, come what may.

“Cheers, kiddo,” Chris says. “It’s good to have you around.”

He knows she means that. He knows she loves him with lioness ferocity even when she doesn’t understand him—even when she thinks he’s wrong; even when she thinks he’s weak. She’s family. She’s more than he could have asked for and better than he probably deserved. She really, really cares, even when it’s hard. Especially then.

So he says “Cheers” and toasts her and knocks it back.

It is pretty damn good vodka, although he’s not sure how the quality measures up to the price. By the time he’s smacked the shot glass back down on the bar, though, Chris already has a rocks glass out next to her empty one.

“Aunt Chris,” Roy says.

“It’s good for you,” she says. She spares a glance for his raised eyebrow and smirks at him. She has a special talent for popping the corks on brandy bottles. “Long-term. C’mon.”

“Just one,” he says. “Why does that sound familiar?”

“Shut it,” she says, but delightedly, and she’s pouring, and he can handle it. It’s just one night. “Here,” she says. He’s barely reached for it before she ducks under the counter and reemerges holding out the key to the coin box on the skee-ball machine. “Go play. Have some _fun_ for once in your life.”

“I’ve had fun at least twice,” he says. “Maybe three times.”

“Touching,” she says.

He picks up the glass. “Thank you.”

“’Course,” she says. “Now git.”

He stands a little ways off and sips a bit, watching Ed go through the darts one at a time with laser-focused precision, like they’re precious. Most of them actually stick in the target, which is pretty damned impressive given how recently Maddie took him under her wing.

Once the sharp projectiles have all been dispensed, Roy crosses the rest of the way to him and folds one arm around him from behind. It’s uncanny how well his body lines up with Ed’s—this way; every way. It’s like they were cut to fit. He thinks sometimes that he never wants to touch another human being. It just wouldn’t be the same.

He can’t put that into words quite right, but his idiot mouth is determined to try. As soon as he’s settled his head against Ed’s, it says, “I love your ears.”

“Thank you,” Ed says. He nods to the brandy cradled carefully in Roy’s other hand. “She liquoring you up?”

“Yes,” Roy says.

Roy hears the things that Ed could say—the things another person might. _You know better. You shouldn’t let her do that to you. You should have held your ground._

“Is it any good?” Ed says.

“Yes,” Roy says.

“Okay, then,” Ed says. “You should eat something, though. Is there a takeout place I could walk to from here?”

“Vanessa’s making something,” Roy says. “She won’t tell me what.”

“Oh, shit,” Maddie says.

“My thoughts exactly,” Roy says.

“Well,” Maddie says, “guess you’d better live it up until the experiment is complete.”

“Also my thoughts exactly,” Roy says.

Ed attempts to crane his neck enough to give Roy some side-eye without actually displacing the arm that Roy wrapped around him. “Is she some kind of mad food scientist, or what?”

“Ish,” Roy says.

“That’s a bit generous,” Maddie says. “She’s… fine when she’s cooking for other people. But when she knows she has a captive audience, she gets… creative. Sometimes in an ingenious way. Usually not.”

“Whatever,” Ed says. “I’ve never found anything that I couldn’t handle eating.”

“You’re going to have the cutest ulcers,” Roy says. “The _cutest_.”

It occurs to him, somewhat belatedly, that he just said that out loud.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Maddie says brightly, “I’m gonna go to the bathroom and barf.”

“Oh, come on,” Roy says. “It wasn’t that bad.”

“Good point,” Maddie says. “Ulcers are adorable.”

She spins on her heel and makes a beeline for the bar before he can argue. Ed pats at Roy’s arm.

“What doesn’t kill me,” Ed says, “makes my stomach lining stronger.”

“I’m not sure that’s how it works,” Roy says.

“Did you come over here to judge my ulcers, or to play Skee-Ball?” Ed asks.

“I’m a fabulous multitasker,” Roy says.

“You’re something, anyway,” Ed says, but he catches Roy’s hand and kisses the knuckles, which changes things a bit.

Ed extracts himself from Roy’s arm only when they’re standing directly in front of the machine, and Roy is trying to figure out if he can spontaneously generate a third hand so that he can do all three. “Can you drink and still destroy at this game at the same time?”

“Unfortunately,” Roy says, “I think I’m actually better at it.”

Ed grins. “I believe you. But prove it anyway.”

“Deal,” Roy says.

He’s done this so many times that he barely even needs his eyes open—establishing a rhythm of throwing with his right hand and sipping from his glass with the left is the work of moments, and his execution is so flawless that anyone in the bar watching this will have little choice but to assume that he’s a Skee-Ball addict _and_ an alcoholic.

Fuck ’em, as Ed would say.

Or, as Ed _is_ saying, “Jesus, you make that look so easy. I know it’s not.”

“It’s not as difficult as it seems when you try it in an arcade for the first time,” Roy says. “It’s just about consistency and relative force. You’re better at physics on the fly than I am; I’m sure you’d pick it up dangerously fast.”

“I dunno,” Ed says. “I’m not as coordinated as you are.”

Roy gives him a significant look.

“What?” Ed says. “I’m not. Or at least not when I’m _trying_ to be. Gymnastics doesn’t count. Because I said so. It’s different. Hand-eye coordination is a whole ’nother thing.”

Roy drains his glass, sets it down on the edge of the unoccupied table behind them, and gestures in a way that he hopes conveys more meaning than it probably does. “Here. I’ll show you.”

“Oh, no,” Ed says, backing away. “I’m not embarrassing myself like that in front of your entire family. I just wanna watch you do it. It’s really hot when you do.”

“Two minutes,” Roy says. “How skilled could I possibly be if I can’t teach it to someone else?”

“Shut up,” Ed says. He takes one tentative step forward, then another, then sighs feelingly and puts his hand into Roy’s. “Two minutes. And only ’cause you’re so damn cute.”

“You spoil me,” Roy says.

One of the very few things in life more sublimely pleasurable than wrapping one arm around Edward Elric is using two. Tonight Roy has a perfect excuse to trail his fingertips down the back of Ed’s forearm and settle his palm against the back of Ed’s hand. He makes a few practice swings, tugging gently.

“Very simple,” he says. “It’s more of a release than a propulsion.”

Ed’s voice comes out very low and ever so slightly strangled. “Was that supposed to sound sexual? ’Cause that sounded sexual.”

“I think you bring it out of me,” Roy says.

Ed snickers, although Roy can feel the heat radiating off of his cheeks. “If I know what you _mean_.”

“This is only going to get worse once we’re talking about how to grip the balls,” Roy says.

One of the even fewer things in life more sublimely pleasurable than wrapping Edward Elric in both arms is feeling his entire body shake with delighted laughter when you’ve already done the wrapping part.

“Hey, babycakes,” Ari says. Her voice is nearing, but Roy is much too invested in his current activity to bother looking up. “I heard you told Ed that you love his ear.”

“It’s the truth,” Roy says.

“Do you have a favorite one?” Ed asks. “Or are they equal?”

“They’re both perfect,” Roy says. He nudges his nose at the closer one. An ungenerous person might call it nuzzling, but he’s not _that_ drunk.

…at least, he doesn’t think so.

“Oh, my God,” Ari says. “I thought Mom was exaggerating the time she told me you just turn into mush when you start drinking.”

“I beg your _pardon_ ,” Roy says. “I am completely corporeal and every bit as structurally sound as I was two drinks ago. Ah—gently.”

The last part is to Ed, who just launched a Skee Ball with far more momentum than it needed—enough, in fact, to make it ricochet off of the back wall and miss the targets altogether.

“That’s what she said,” Ari says.

Roy turns just far enough to give her a side-eye, and it is at that point that he notices that she’s replaced his empty glass with a full one while he has his back turned.

“ _Hey_ ,” he says.

“Not even close to sorry,” Ari says. “You lovebirds have fun.”

“I promised her one,” Roy says.

“They’re free,” Ari says.

“Think of the children,” Roy says. “Think of my liver. Think of how obnoxious I’ll be tomorrow if I’m hungover.”

“How long are you guys staying, anyway?” Ari says.

Roy has given up on trying to coach Skee-Ball and do damage control at the same time. He hopes Ed won’t hold it against him. “Just tomorrow.”

“Loser,” Ari says, but possibly in a loving way. “Disneyland?”

Roy suppresses a wince. “Are tickets still at one family fortune these days, or have they raised it to two?”

“I dunno if I’d want to go to Disneyland anyway,” Ed says. “My mom took us one time when we were reallylittle, but the only thing I really remember is that Al got super scared on ‘Small World’ and cried the whole time, and I was so busy trying to make him feel better that I wasn’t looking around, and the minute we got off the ride, I threw up.”

“At least you didn’t throw up in the boat,” Roy says. “It’s… definitely better than you remember.”

“You threw up at Disneyland, too,” Ari says.

“Who _hasn’t_ thrown up at Disneyland?” Roy says.

“Touché,” Ari says. She brings the glass over to him. “Drink up.”

“This isn’t even a refill,” Roy says. “Does she think I need the caffeine to stay awake?”

Ed stares at the glass. “Wait, you can tell what it is by _looking_ at it?”

“Growing up in a bar gives you shitty superpowers,” Roy says. “It’s a rum and coke. Probably decent rum, too, because she’s trying to apologize for forcing me to drink it in the first place. You want some?”

“I guess,” Ed says, still eyeing it.

“Do you want me to test it first to make sure?” Roy says.

Ed grins at him. “Yeah.”

He’s just raised the glass to his mouth—he can smell that he’s right, and also that it’s _good_ rum—when Ari says “I’m having a crisis.”

He pauses, blinking. “Wh—”

“No, no, it’s fine,” she says, waving him on. “It’s a small crisis. Just—look at you! You found a super-perfect boyfriend eating your Chinese food in lab, and now you’re just _set_ , whereas I’ve been scouring the darkest corners of L.A. for a halfway-decent man for, like, five solid years—”

Roy tries not to grimace. “Ari… have _you_ been drinking?”

“It’s New Year’s,” she says. “Of course I’ve been drinking. Is it a gay thing? Is it just, like—removing the expectations of the gender roles solves all your problems?”

“No,” Roy says, which is… a start, at least, on that question. “How much—”

“Obviously not enough!” Ari says, but her voice cracks on the last syllable, and the trill of a nervous laugh shakes on its way out, and her eyes start gleaming—

“Oh, Lord,” Roy says, mostly under his breath. He squeezes Ed’s shoulders gently and then extracts the arm he still had around Ed. “Give me just a second? Ari, honey—come on. Let’s get some air.”

“No, uh—no problem,” Ed says. Half of a wince makes it through, but he contains the rest. “Take your time.”

Roy catches Ari’s arm with his free hand, then steers them towards the back room. He makes a veering detour towards the bar and extends the hand holding his glass, extending the few fingers that he doesn’t need to grasp it. Chris is already waiting—she tucks the neck of a bottle of Viniq into his fingers as he and Ari pass by. The bottle’s only about a third full, so she doesn’t bother giving him with a glass.

Ari starts sniffling before they even make it past the closet; tears have spilled by the time Roy opens the back door and ushers her out into the cool and quiet of the alley behind Chris’s place. If they’re very lucky, they’ll have a whole half-hour before the breeze changes direction and blows the aroma of the Dumpsters directly into their faces, or someone staggers back here and vomits on their shoes.

“Deep breath,” he says. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

“No,” Ari says, fumbling for something in her pocket. “But I b-bet I will anyway.”

“Mustang tradition,” Roy says.

“It’s the reason we don’t get kidnapped,” Ari says. She has… a lighter. “Duct tape couldn’t keep us quiet if we started having an inkling of an impulse to overshare like a fucking moron.” Now she also has a pack of cigarettes. “FBI’d find us in twenty minutes by following the ‘Okay, I probably shouldn’t tell you this, _but_ …’”

“I thought you quit,” Roy says as she taps out a cigarette and jams the business end into her mouth. Her lipstick smudges.

“I did,” she says around it. “And then I _un_ -quit, because it’s bullshit, and everything’s bullshit, and I keep _trying_ with everything I’ve fucking _got_ to just— _find_ somebody, find _anybody_ who isn’t a shithead underneath, and—” Her hands tremble so hard that she can’t light the end; the flame wavers and misses again and again; her voice breaks brand-new— “And then p-people say—people! They say shit like ‘Well, you won’t find love if you’re _looking_ ’! What the fuck is that supposed to mean? It’s not a fucking Edible Arrangement that’s gonna get delivered to my doorstep by mistake! How the fuck else am I supposed to get anywhere if I don’t try? I can’t just sit on my ass and get old by my fucking self, Roy; I just _can’t_ , but it’s—everyone’s—people are just _shit_ , and I hate them, and I hate the things they do to each other, and they _lie_ , Roy—”

“I know,” he says. “Here—”

He holds the end of the cigarette, gingerly pulls the lighter out of her hand, and lights her cancer stick up for her.

“Thanks, babe,” she says wetly. One long drag seems to help a little, right up until she coughs on the smoke on the way out, which summons a different kind of tears and appears to push out several that she’d successfully contained up to now. “Fuck. It—I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know who I’m supposed to _be_ to make this shit work. What if it just—doesn’t? Not ever? I’m fucking thirty-seven, Roy; I’m dyeing my hair already, and my skin’s shot, and my fucking eggs are dying, and I can only wear heels for four hours before my feet nope the fuck out, and—and I haven’t _done_ anything. I feel like I got the best fucking second chance in the entire history of the entire world, and I haven’t done a single goddamn thing. I wasted it. I threw it away. You know?”

“Yeah,” Roy says. “I do.”

She snorts, then chokes on the smoke a little bit again. He pats her back, though he isn’t entirely sure which part that’s more likely to help with.

“Like hell,” she says. “Look at you! Out there doing science and genius-y shit—”

“I haven’t actually done anything yet,” Roy says. “The past four and a half years have primarily been a matter of avoiding getting a real job by staying in school indefinitely, because I don’t know how to do anything else.”

She sniffles vigorously. “You were in _National Geographic_ , you liar.”

“Yeah,” Roy says. “For work my PI did, that I helped with, sort of, which I haven’t even finished yet.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Ari says. She exhales smoke much more successfully this time. “You took it and ran. You’re still probably gonna get somewhere.”

He thinks they’re doing better right up until he blinks, and droplets are coalescing at the corners of her eyes again.

“I just don’t wanna die alone, Roy,” she says. “I just—”

“Everybody dies alone,” Roy says.

She gives him a very damp but very dangerous evil eye. “That was _so_ fucking not what you were supposed to say, and you know it.”

The brutally realistic approach is not working. If Roy had put about a sixteenth of a second of thought into it before he opened his mouth, he probably could have predicted that.

“Sorry,” he says. He holds out the Viniq now that she’s got the cigarette under control. “Here.” He needs a new approach. “I… know a guy. That I could try to set you up with. It’d be long-distance right now, but he’s got family down here.”

She sniffles again, loudly, but the glare has softened a little bit. “What, some kind of gorgeous hunk with a heart of gold—and also a vault of gold; we gotta be practical, here—who’s gonna love me and adore me and dote on me for the rest of my natural life?”

“I mean,” Roy says, digging out his phone to search for Alex’s Instagram, “pretty much.”

“Shit,” Ari says. She takes a slug from the Viniq and then looks fastidiously up at the light-polluted sky, dabbing under her eyes with a fingertip so that she won’t ruin her makeup any worse. “I’m sorry. You come and visit for the first time in years, and here I am having a stupid meltdown all over you while you’re trying to be happy. It’s just—it’s this stupid holiday. _The_ stupid holidays. Supposed to be about celebrating everything you’ve accomplished over the course of the year. Just rips me up. I don’t know. I shouldn’t let it get to me.”

“Let me know if you figure out how to uninstall emotions,” Roy says. “It’s shitty how people make the holidays about that. It’s all arbitrary. Most other cultures have their new year at other times of the year anyway, right? Why can’t this one just be about drinking yourself stupid with your weird family and your kid brother?”

Ari shifts the bottle and the cigarette to one hand so that she can reach out to ruffle his hair with the other one. “You haven’t been a kid since you were, like, six. And you know it.”

“I don’t see why that’s relevant,” Roy says. “Here. This is Alex. The genes with the hair in his family are all over the map, but other than that he’s pretty much the perfect guy.”

Ari squints at his phone. “What’s the catch?”

“Voice like a bullhorn,” Roy says. “Bizarre speech patterns. Sparkles a little bit.”

Ari squints harder. “We talkin’ _Twilight_ , or leftover body glitter from going to raves?”

“I have no idea,” Roy says. “I’ve always been too scared to ask.”

She wipes a little more at her eyes, takes another drag off of the cigarette, and then repossesses his phone. “How old is he?”

“Twenty-eight,” Roy says. “Went to grad school for fun. Y’know. Like you do when your family’s fucking loaded.”

“You had me at ‘fucking loaded’,” Ari says, grinning around the cigarette. Despite the utter and complete lack of blood relation, she looks a lot like Chris. “Always wanted to be a little bit of a cougar.”

“Really?” Roy says.

“No,” Ari says. “But you know what they say about desperate times.”

“I hadn’t heard ‘Desperate times call for cradle-robbing’,” Roy says, “but I guess I don’t get out much.”

“Smartass,” Ari says. She holds up the Viniq. “You wanna make this year the one where we ruin as many proverbs as possible?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Roy says, and he clinks his glass against the bottle as hard as he dares.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot that this fic existed again and I'M SO SORRY
> 
> Special shout-out to fantastic commenter JeffPipp, who has helped me to solidify the running joke that absolutely _no one_ knows Treavisor's real name – including me, because I have completely forgotten which one I picked back in 2014. XD

“Jeez,” Vanessa says the instant that Roy and Ari step back inside, carrying an empty bottle and an empty glass—but hopefully a little less baggage. “Took you long enough. It’s getting cold.”

Roy knew that this nice, floaty, trillingly amused tipsy phase was destined to end in tears. “What’s getting c—”

He smells the answer, then sees it.

“What the hell is that?” he manages.

“I made you and Ed Monte Cristos,” Vanessa says.

Roy stares at the thing on a plate. On his plate, apparently. Oh, God. “Is this this part with the bloody vengeance?”

“Smartass,” Vanessa says. They must have agreed on that one in the car. “You’re going to eat it, and you’re going to like it.”

Ed is already halfway through devouring the second sandwich-breakfast-something abomination. Roy got his fairy tale ending after all: he’s fallen in love with a monster.

“The syrup is weird at first,” Ed says, licking his fingertips, which at least helps distract Roy from the imminent doom, “but it kinda works.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure?” Maddie says.

“It’s camera-shy,” Roy says. “If you put this on Snapchat or—”

Ari pries the waiting phone out of Maddie’s hands and pockets it. “Eat something before you get drunk on an empty stomach, babycakes,” she says. “Even if it’s… that.”

“Rude,” Vanessa says.

“It’s _good_ ,” Ed says. “I’m serious.”

“At least cake-baby loves me,” Vanessa says.

Roy can feel a faint premonition of a headache twirling just behind his eyes. He’s not entirely sure whether it’s dancing to the beat of the prospective hangover or to the sheer quantity of chaos.

Before he can decide which is a greater threat to his overall neurological health, Chris turns the music up from the level of background ambience to something much more recognizable as a party volume.

Roy hates parties, and also loud things, and also sandwiches that look like they wanted to contain ham and cheese before they experienced an extremely unfortunate encounter with the deep-fryer and then French-kissed death.

He sits down at the bar and contemplates his fate where the lattermost is concerned. “Are you sure that this is safe? Are you sure that this is _legal_?”

“Again,” Maddie says. “Sense of adventure.”

Ed has very nearly finished his, but Vanessa probably made Ed’s slightly less dangerous in the hopes of impressing him; in addition to which Ed has proven on multiple occasions that he is completely impervious to food-borne illness, scalding heat, and flavor combinations that would turn a lesser man pale. It’s a pity that ‘Fear Factor’ isn’t on the air anymore; they could have made some easy money for once.

“What do I even eat this with?” Roy asks, although he knows that it’s a losing battle at this point. “A fork? A shovel?”

“Oh,” Vanessa says, very deliberately, “my _God_.”

“I don’t want to die with syrup all over my hands,” Roy says. “Is that a crime? Lock me up.”

“Call the cops,” Maddie says. “Or should it be the CDC? Babycakes has a bad case of the prissy-pants.”

“We have a _bathroom_ ,” Vanessa says. “You can wash your hands afterwards.”

“I just don’t understand why I’m being forced to eat breakfast and dinner at the same time,” Roy says. “Or why they’re both disguised as grilled cheese. Or why—”

“Eat, Roy,” Ari says.

Ed reaches out and very gently pats Roy’s shoulder. Roy takes a moment to mourn the fact that there will be syrup ingrained in the fibers of this shirt for the rest of time.

“Family, right?” Ed says.

Roy eyes each of the demon women in turn, sets his jaw, grits his teeth, and picks up the abomination masquerading as a sandwich.

He takes a bite.

He puts the sandwich back down.

He chews.

He swallows.

“I don’t have any family,” he says. “They’re all dead to me.”

Each of his sisters makes a different face at him, which—put together with the alcohol that he really shouldn’t have risked—is just enough to distract him from his surroundings right up until something that feels suspiciously like a sequined top hat thumps down on his head.

“Lighten up, babycakes,” Aunt Chris says.

  


* * *

  


Once Roy gets over the _impulse_ to wait for his gag reflex, the sandwich itself actually isn’t as bad as he’d feared. It has cheese in it, after all. Cheese can make up for a lot.

It also gives him an excuse to laze around at the bar in a half-drunk haze with the love of his life after he’s finished. Even a sequined top hat can’t dull the shine on the contentment right this second. He’s just too tipsy to second-guess the vague feeling that the world is kind, and things are good, and he’s allowed to feel good about it. That combination doesn’t come around often. He clings to it when he can.

“That’s a good look for you,” Ed says.

“Bullshit, it is,” Roy says.

“Shut up,” Ed says. There’s a touch of pink in his cheeks, although he’s trying to play it off by looking idly out over the people scattered around the place. “You know damn well that everything’s a good look for you.”

“Why, Mr. _Elric_ ,” Roy says. “Are you flirting with me?”

“I’m gonna put syrup in your hair in a minute,” Ed says, flushing harder.

“At least let me buy you a drink first,” Roy says.

“I don’t want a drink,” Ed says. “I want syrup in your hair and two weeks of you complaining about me putting syrup in your hair.”

“Truly,” Roy says, “romance is dead.”

“Romance is out,” Ed says. “Realism is in. Would it be better if it was jam instead of syrup?”

“At least then I might get some color out of it,” Roy says. “Do you think I’d look too scene-kid-circa-2002 if I dyed my bangs?”

“Just told you,” Ed says, half-grudging, half-ringingly sincere. “Everything’s a good look.”

“What if I dyed them green?” Roy says. “Green would be tragic.”

“What’ll be tragic,” Ed says, trying not to grin at him, “is if you don’t can it, and I go in the back and get the whole damn syrup dispenser and turn it upside-down over your head.”

“I thought syrup was a good look,” Roy says.

“Silence is a good look,” Ed says. “You might wanna try that one out for a while.”

Roy lets the smirk curl slow and searingly warm. “Not really my style, but you know I’ll try anything once.”

Ed goes very, very pink again. “Don’t make me put a hand over your mouth.”

“I’d try that once, too,” Roy says.

Ed stares at him flatly until he starts to laugh.

Roy finished the last drink, but even after the fairly substantial crime-of-a-sandwich, he’s not sure that he’ll be able to walk out of here if he has another one, so he’s been hiding his empty glass from Chris’s line of sight. The place has filled up enough that he’s hoping that neither she nor the trio of Macbeth-worthy witches will notice and try to top him off. He’s probably already a danger to himself and others at this point.

“What time is it?” he asks, realizing too late that that’s a question that he could answer on his own by extracting his phone from his pocket like a grownup.

Ed doesn’t seem to mind. Roy marvels, sometimes—often, really—at the long list of things that _don’t_ bother Ed.

“Ten thirty,” Ed says. “Wow. Huh. Time sure flies when you’re…” He grimaces. “…doing… stuff.”

Roy has to credit the unwanted alcohol with one thing: it makes it easier to laugh deeply and loosely and loudly. It makes it easier not to care who hears him, or who turns at the noise to notice how he feels in this moment.

In this moment, he feels good. He feels warm. He feels unashamed and unassailable. He’s here, at last; he’s wound down another beast of a year; he’s closing it out and moving on. He won this round. He survived.

And Ed is more beautiful and wonderful and captivating than ever sitting there with another glass of soda in his hand, leaning back against the bar and sipping from the straw, eyes ranging over the revelers who have elected to end the year rip-roaring drunk. Condensation from the glass gleams on Ed’s fingertips; the dim light shines on his hair, shimmers on his eyes, casts soft shadows underneath his cheekbones and deepens the dark circles. He’s something out of a series of gentle dreams that Roy never believed that he was allowed to think of, or to ask for, let alone to _have_.

Ed props an elbow on the bar, settles his chin on it, and focuses on Roy now, raising an eyebrow. His mouth twists.

“So,” he says. “What do you want to do for another hour and a half?”

“Stare at you,” Roy says. “You’re gorgeous. I can’t believe I’ve wasted my life with science. I should’ve been an artist. Do you think there’s time to learn, or do I have to design a time machine so that I can go back and start over?”

Ed rolls his eyes without much venom and sighs without much force.

It took Roy a while, towards the beginning, to realize that Ed doesn’t believe him—not because Ed doesn’t trust Roy’s compliments, precisely; not because Ed thinks Roy’s lying, but because the fundamental rules of Ed’s universe have defined a world in which Ed is not and could never be physically attractive to a person that he actually wants.

Roy is chipping away at it to the best of his ability. Ed still doesn’t take his prosthetic off at home very often. Unless he’s in a significant amount of pain, and Roy cajoles him about it subtly and brings him tea and a blanket and nestles in close with him and phrases it exactly right, mostly it stays on right up until they go to bed. Lately Ed has occasionally been known to take a shower and wander their apartment without it for a while afterwards, but it’s strangely like he’s backtracked since the original trip, where he kept reminding Roy of its presence like it was a challenge. Like it was a test.

Ed has started wearing short sleeves inside sometimes, but only very rarely—and only when it’s excessively warm—can he be found in lab or out in public with the scar-riddled right arm on display. When they’re occasionally feeling motivated enough to hit the gym, if Roy plays everything very cool, Ed will sometimes put on a tank top—which is tantalizing as _hell_ in addition to looking a bit like progress—but he keeps his forearm angled inward towards his body for as much of the time as he can. Roy’s not completely sure that Ed even knows that he’s doing it. It might be so ingrained that it’s instinctual at this point.

Ed’s universe is governed by a hundred-thousand tiny scales. He sees his deadbeat father in the mirror and a gap beneath the blankets where a leg would be. The fact that he looks and feels and speaks and kisses like sunlight breaking through the clouds doesn’t add up to _enough_ in his bookkeeping. He’s taught himself that the absences are what there is, what _he_ is, and trained himself to get used to it.

“I mean it,” Roy says. He knows that he has a lot of whittling still ahead of him, but this is one of those rare cases where the journey really does bear its own rewards. “Photography? Is that a little easier to pick up late in the game than portrait painting? I can turn our bathroom into a darkroom. We don’t need it anyway, do we?”

“Veto,” Ed says, but there’s a smile toying with his mouth now. Roy is jealous of it. “You’re such a flatterer.”

“It’s just the truth,” Roy says. “Would you deny me my God-given right to describe reality as I understand it?”

“No,” Ed says, “but I’m sure as hell denying you another drink.”

“That’s fair,” Roy says. Motion from across the room catches his attention. “Hour and a half to go, huh?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.

“Okay,” Roy says. “You want to watch me murder Maddie at pool even though I’ve just been cut off?”

“ _Yeah_ ,” Ed says.

  


* * *

  


The cold-blooded killing doesn’t go quite as cleanly as it would have if they’d both been sober, but Roy still accounts for himself fairly well. He then does it again in the obligatory rematch; and then again in the rematch-rematch. On their way across the room, Ed asked if he could take pictures of this, since it doesn’t involve syrup and _does_ involve photos of Roy very deftly handling a long wooden stick, and Roy choked on his own spit hard enough to unsettle his breathing rhythms, which has increased the level of the challenge somewhat. Trying to negotiate the perfect angles and the precise amounts of force while determinedly not watching Ed’s face light up behind a phone camera has also complicated matters, but Roy is nothing if not ferociously competitive when he knows that he can win.

To her credit, of course, Maddie gives him a good run for his money, but by the third game, he’s so warmed up that he could probably keep Chris herself on her toes.

“I’m sending this one to Al,” Ed says, tapping away with both thumbs as Roy finishes resetting the table. “It looks like an ad for a James Bond movie. I bet he’ll photoshop it into a movie poster for me, and we can put it up on the wall.”

“That would be so vain,” Roy manages, despite the way his heart is spiraling in sheer ecstasy at the thought of Ed wanting his face plastered up in their little living room.

“It’ll be a conversation starter,” Ed says. “Y’know, if we ever make any friends.”

“Al is our friend,” Roy says. “And… Winry. And…”

“What’s-his-name,” Ed says, but he’s so focused on the phone screen that Roy can’t tell if Treavisor’s name is eluding him on a temporary basis or a permanent one. “I’m not sure Al counts, ’cause he’s related; and Winry practically is. Guess we’ve got Maes, but he hasn’t visited. I think having a toddler in our square footage would probably blow our eardrums after a couple hours anyway. I bet we could make a _series_ of movie posters—y’know, like a whole row of them.” He looks up and then around himself, bright-eyed and just so damned _adorable_ that Roy’s heart squeezes until he can’t breathe all over again. “I’m trying to think how we could get started on that tonight.”

Roy picks up the sequined top hat that he set aside for the purposes of ruining slightly fewer of Ed’s photos. “Sounds like a perfect way to get a start on my photography career—or my photographing-you career, really. You looked very dramatic on top of obscenely delicious in the light we had at the bar earlier.”

Ed flushes again. “Shut up. I did not. What, you want me to just hold a glass in my hand and look broody or something?”

“Yes,” Roy says.

“I am not ‘delicious’,” Ed says, but he’s starting back for the bar. “We’re people, not food.”

“Bold words from someone who was talking about dipping me in syrup earlier,” Roy says.

“ _Eugh_ ,” Ed says.

The state of _eugh_ doesn’t seem to be particularly potent: Ed lets Roy pose him on the bar, more pink jumping to his cheeks when Roy very lightly touches his wrists and shoulders and jaw and chin to shift him or tilt him just slightly, and then concedes to be photographed for almost five uninterrupted minutes before he says “Are you _done_ yet?”

By then, Al has texted back and indicated that he’s passing a very dull evening with Sherman and some of Netflix’s less-impressive recommendations, so they send him a series of progressively sillier selfies and receive quite a number in return. Sherman looks like he can think of at least a dozen better ways to spend New Year’s Eve, but he’s being a good sport about it nonetheless.

They keep that up for a little while until Al’s responses slow a bit, which probably means that Netflix’s diabolical algorithms finally found something that he likes.

That’s perfectly all right with Roy, as it happens, because it turns out that the barstools are positioned just close enough to one another that he can sling an arm around Ed’s shoulders again and lean his head on Ed’s while they watch some cat videos on Ed’s phone. And then some ill-advised backyard science videos. And then something that they both think is a movie trailer until it turns out to be an ad.

And then there’s either one of those uncanny room-wide lulls in conversation, or Chris turns the music up again, or both, because Roy immediately, unmistakably hears the opening to “Wicked Game”.

He’s up on his feet, twisting back towards Ed and holding both hands out, almost before he knows that he’s moved.

Ed looks at Roy’s hands, looks up in the direction of the nearest speaker in the ceiling, tilts his head, wrinkles his nose, and then look at Roy’s hands again.

“Nope,” Ed says. “No goddamn way.”

“It’s our song,” Roy says.

“It’s _a_ song,” Ed says. “Which you tried to sell as ‘our song’ at that guy’s parents’ place because you were mad at me.”

Poor Treavisor.

“I wasn’t mad at you,” Roy says. “I was pining. I’m just not very good at it.”

“Good thing you don’t have to do it anymore, then,” Ed says. “You know what’s worse than two left feet?” He points, as if Roy could possibly not know the punchline. “No left foot.”

“I have personally seen you do backflips,” Roy says.

“That’s different,” Ed says.

“Come on,” Roy says. The original version has much more of a slow-dance vibe to it. He’s feeling that. He wiggles his fingers in a way that he hopes is inviting, although it probably just looks like he’s trying to exorcise a theater kid. “It’s New Year’s Eve in a city where nobody knows us. Let’s do something stupid for once.”

“We do stupid shit all the time,” Ed says. After one more long look, though, he slides down off of his barstool, tromps over, and seizes Roy’s hands in both of his. “We just write it down and call it ‘science’ so that we can get away with it.”

Roy lifts his left hand, which is joined with Ed’s right, and kisses Ed’s knuckles one by one.

“Gross,” Ed says.

“That’s the idea,” Roy says.

Ed makes a face that is much more faux-resigned than actually bothered, but his eyes dart sideways and scan the room for a fraction of a second before they return to where Roy’s thumb is running back and forth across his fingers.

Ed’s mileage with PDA tends to vary based on foreseeable factors, such as the company they’re in and how well they know those people; and less predictable ones, such as the temperature and the time of day and the alignment of the constellations. He tends to be cautious about brushing their hands together on the sidewalk in unfamiliar cities; and he’s restrained even in the relative safety of their lab. On the flipside, there had been a time when Al had coaxed them out to the movies, and Roy, on a rant about the cost of the concessions, had said “I’ll bet you the astronomical cost of a ‘small’ popcorn that I could derive the chemical composition of the fake butter and produce it at a negligible cost, and then I could sell it right outside this capitalist hellhole and make a _fortune_ ”, and Ed grabbed him by the collar and kissed him until Roy saw stars.

Ed doesn’t know this bar yet. Ed doesn’t know this city. He doesn’t know what kinds of people inhabit the latter and frequent the former; he doesn’t know who’s here and what they’ll think and what they might do, given sufficient motive. He doesn’t know if it’s safe to be who they are, and what they are, or if they’re risking retribution.

It doesn’t have to come to the point of violence, either. Ed has suffered enough judgment over the years that Roy despises the thought of subjecting him to more of it—to the side-eyes, to the glares, to the commentary. It doesn’t matter how close-minded people are; it doesn’t matter that they’re objectively incorrect. It still hurts. It always hurts.

If Roy had his way, Edward Elric would never have to feel like shit again for the rest of his natural life.

So Roy changes his mind, and their course: he tugs gently on Ed’s hands and draws him over to the doorway that leads off to the hall, which leads to the back room—which is quiet and empty but still boasts a speaker, from which Chris Isaak’s voice pours even clearer.

Roy sees Ed’s shoulders untense a little. That’s beautiful, too. It’s a beautiful fucking world, sometimes, and he just wants to be _in_ it; he just wants to be a part of it without feeling like he’s being dragged along behind the wagon, bleeding and reeling in the dust. Without feeling like he’s the sore spot; like he’s the half-healed wound that itches until you pick the scab and make it worse and leave it swollen up and stinging all over again. Like he’s lost. Like he’s backwards. Like he’ll always, always be not-right.

He wraps his arms around Ed as tight as he dares and buries his face in Ed’s incomparable hair. They’re swaying more than they’re dancing, really—like a tiny little awkward prom. Like the world out there might stop for a minute if they just don’t _leave_.

Roy knows better than that.

Ed’s arms loop around him—more of a hug than any kind of a position they could dance from; Roy moves his feet just to keep up the pretense. Shifting gently back and forth feels reassuring anyway; he thinks of ocean waves and willows in the wind. Things that return. Things that endure.

“Are you okay?” Ed says. “This’s been… I dunno. It’s been a lot. More for you, I think. I’m not as deep in it. Don’t have as much of a stake. But you’re… how are you holding up?”

“It’s better with you,” Roy says into Ed’s hair. Maybe he’s still a little tipsy. Maybe a lot. “Everything is better with you. Even when it doesn’t… even when I still can’t…”

“Hey,” Ed says, squeezing a little tighter. “Life’s uphill. That’s how it works. That’s how it goes.” He tugs gently on the back of Roy’s shirt. “We’re just gonna have sexy calves.”

Roy buries his face a little deeper. It’s nice here. Silky. Soothing. Smells good. “You already do.”

“Singular,” Ed says.

“No,” Roy says. “The left one’s just as good.”

“I’m gonna tell Winry you said that,” Ed says. “She’ll probably throw you a parade.”

“I don’t want a parade,” Roy says. “I just want you.”

“Careful what you wish for,” Ed says.

“You’re better than a parade,” Roy says. “Nicer. And prettier. And quieter. Well—quieter… eighty percent of the time. Maybe eighty-five.”

“And I don’t smell like horses, or like band kids who’ve been out in the sun all day,” Ed says.

“Both are a plus,” Roy says. He rests his head on Ed’s, eyes closed, feeling their hearts beat against each other. One of Ed’s palms skates idly up and down his back. “I mean it.”

“Yeah,” Ed says. “Horses are impressive and all, but you don’t wanna be downwind of ’em after something like that. Or of the band kids. I always wondered if the whole band thing was a cult, but Al would never agree to break into their practice room after school with me, and I didn’t want to do it alone in case they caught me and sacrificed me to the tuba gods.”

“I meant the ‘I want you’ thing,” Roy says. “But I _am_ pretty sure that band’s a cult.”

“Knew it,” Ed mumbles. He rubs at Roy’s spine in a meaningful way. “Stop saying shit like that when you’re drunk.”

“I’m not _drunk_ ,” Roy says. “I’m just tipsier than is entirely safe or remotely necessary. There’s a fine line. Do you want me to say it when I’m sober? I will. Repeatedly. I’ll get a tattoo.”

“ _No_ ,” Ed says.

What a wicked game indeed—wicked, and strange, and wonderful. Roy still doesn’t know the rules. He thinks he’s winning anyway. He’s not sure that he’s ever been quite this lucky in his life.

“It’ll be a small one,” he says. “Subtle. Classy. _Edward Elric is my main squeeze_ inside of a heart. Only a little bit of flame. Minimal cherubs.”

“Veto,” Ed says.

“Where should I put it, do you think?” Roy asks. “I feel like the bicep is a timeless classic, but the small of my back is a modern classic. Then again, if I put it lower, I could tell everyone that my ass has your name on it.”

“Yeah,” Ed says. “Just throw that out in job interviews. Or in lab meeting. Or when you’re makin’ small-talk with somebody while you’re waiting for the bus.”

“The less context, the better,” Roy says. “I could go around to people’s houses like a solicitor— _Hello, sir, do you have a minute to talk about our Lord and Savior Edward Elric? Let me show you my ass tattoo, and then run very fast before you call the cops_.”

Ed is trying not to laugh, but he’s not doing a very good job—despite the fact that he’s buried his face in Roy’s shirt to attempt to muffle it, the shaking of his shoulders gives him away.

“You’re so fucking romantic,” Ed says. “Didn’t even know you bought me land in the UK or wherever so that I could be a lord. Real thoughtful. Do we still have grocery money?”

“Who needs to eat when you can be a baron in a country that you’ve never visited?” Roy says. “I’ll buy one for me, too, and we can stop paying utilities.”

“My title will keep me full, and my pride will keep me warm,” Ed says. “Perfect.”

“You are, though,” Roy says. “You are perfect.”

“Bull _shit_ ,” Ed says, so vehemently that Roy grips him a little tighter on instinct. “I’m loud and weird, and I drink too much coffee and yammer about science and whine about getting out of bed in the morning because I stay up too late; and when I’m too tired or really scared I get mean as _hell_ , and—”

“That’s not what I mean,” Roy says.

“Jesus,” Ed says. “You’re the one with the stupid vocabulary—so what does ‘perfect’ mean if it doesn’t mean ‘perfect’, smarty-pants?”

“Perfect for _me_ ,” Roy says before he can stop himself, rewind, delete, remaster, and rerelease as a director’s cut on DVD. “We’re—good together. We fit. That’s what I mean. It feels perfect.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, very softly, and his fingers are curling tighter into the back of Roy’s shirt. “Yeah, it’s… special. Isn’t it? I don’t have a control group, so it’s not like I can _really_ say that, but it just… who cares? I’m really… happy. I’m really happy with you.”

Roy should not have had that last drink, or the one before it, because they have significantly raised the likelihood that he will cry.

Ed tugs on his shirt again, and Roy can hear the sly little smile in his voice. “Even when you’re tryin’ to get me to do stupid shit like slow-dance in the back room of your mom’s bar.”

Roy thinks it over. “Stupid? Or schmoopid?”

Ed is trying not to laugh again, but he’s not doing much better than the first time. “Yes.”

“For our anniversary,” Roy says, refusing to let the tidal-wave thought of planning for a future bowl him over, “I’m going to get you a stuffed mountain lion.”

“That’ll go well with my lordship,” Ed says. “You mean, like, a plush one, or taxidermy?”

“If I tell you,” Roy says, “it won’t be a surprise.”

Ed snorts.

Roy loves him, loves him, loves him, every goddamn second of the day.

  


* * *

  


Ari, who is behind the bar helping Chris now but has definitely had a few drinks of her own, gives them a very long and un-subtle onceover as they return to the bar. Ed’s hand has drifted into the space between them, fingers brushing against Roy’s much too often to look like an accident.

“That was fast,” she says. “You boys have fun?”

“Ha,” Roy says. “Cutting. Brilliant. Scintillating. Devastatingly apt. An unrivaled masterwork of wit.”

“I try,” Ari says.

Ed makes a face at her—the same one he makes at Al, which is sweet and unsettling in equal measure—and then fishes his phone out of his pocket again. He glances at the screen and then shows it to Roy.

It is entirely possible that large swathes of time have disappeared into the annals of history unremembered by Roy’s tipsy-ass brain: somehow they’ve made it to eleven forty-five.

“I remember New Year’s being so cool when I was a kid,” Ed says. “Staying up until midnight was so awesome, and so _hard_. Felt like forever.”

“Now it feels like a day of the week that ends in _Y_ ,” Roy says.

“Better a day that ends in _Y_ than a day that ends in lab,” Ed says. “Although there’s a lot of overlap.”

Roy can’t argue with that.

  


* * *

  


Maybe it’s appropriate that the last fifteen minutes of the year whirl around him in a blur of strangers’ faces and the shine of the lights off of their raised glasses, with a chattering babble underscored by the meaningless announcer-talk on the TV. Most of the world has been in a different year for hours already. The whole room echoes the countdown. Ed bounces over and climbs up onto a table to hit the button for his jury-rigged disco ball contraption (of doom, very likely; patent pending) and sends it into a delightfully well-measured slow descent. Maddie found the wretched sequined hat again and shoved it onto Roy’s head hard enough that he didn’t dare to argue.

It feels, sometimes, that his whole life is like this—a wash of color and sound and sensation too dense and too fast for him to experience, let alone to remember. It feels, so often, that time isn’t just passing; it’s passing him _by_. It’s crushing him down to fragments, and it’s leaving him behind.

Most nights, that terrifies him. Most nights, he can hear the clock ticking, and his heart beating, and the tempo and the volume increase in his head until they’re a deafening drumbeat, intertwined and inescapable, and all he can think about is how few of each of them he has left. How little time he has to matter, to be _anything_ , to make some sort of difference. How pathetically small it all is, against the size and weight and complexity of the universe. How fitful. How meaningless.

But as the count dwindles, and the disco ball of doom winds towards its destination, Ed jumps down from the table. He hurtles through the crowd that has gathered to stare up at the television, liberally using his elbows until he’s parted enough bodies to reach the place where Roy stands off to the side—crying “Wait! Wait!” the whole way, just loud enough to be heard over the strange mantra of the countdown, like he intends to stop time if it won’t stop for him.

If anyone could, it’s Edward Elric, with that grin and those eyes and that spirit. When Roy least expected it, he stumbled into someone who can take on the whole world and fight it and sometimes even _win_.

Roy has been picking his battles for as long as he understood the concept of strategizing. Very, very rarely does he choose the ones where he’d be fighting on his own behalf.

He knows that Ed will. He knows that Ed will fight for him with everything in that spectacular little frame.

The spectacular little frame in question has just hurled itself at Roy—precisely coinciding with the stroke of midnight that echoes through the room, iterated and reiterated by the unfamiliar voices all around them. Ed fists both hands in Roy’s shirtfront and drags him down to smash their mouths together.

It hurts for a second, because Ed wasn’t very careful of either his momentum or his teeth, but then it’s fucking glorious. Roy supposes that that’s more or less what life is.

He also supposes that if life has quite a lot more kissing Ed fervently for the first several moments of a new year in it, it might just be worth his while.

The first several moments segue into several more moments, and then several moments after that, and Roy _really_ likes the interesting things that Ed does with his tongue. Breathing regularly is overrated anyway. Roy will die someday whether or not he interrupts this rapture long enough to breathe.

Ed’s leg ends up deciding the matter, as far as Roy can tell—Ed wobbles perceptibly, and then he sinks down onto his heels from where he’d pushed himself up on his toes, which puts just enough distance between their mouths that they both drop abruptly back into reality. Reality is, as a general rule, not nearly as pleasant as making out with Ed, but getting to look down at him as he stands there blinking and gasping with his mouth wet and his cheeks flushed and his eyes slightly glazed is enough of a reward that Roy can’t really complain.

That’s something of a novelty, isn’t it?

“Shit,” Ed says. “Uh. Hi. Sorry.”

“What in the hell are you sorry for?” Roy asks. “Thank you.”

Ed grins at him again. That will never get old. As long as Roy lives, that will never lose its luster. “What in the hell are you thanking me for? I probably bruised you. And I wrinkled the crap out of your shirt.”

“Fuck my shirt,” Roy says. “Thank you for existing. Thank you for being who you are.”

Ed flushes a little hotter. “‘Fuck your shirt’ is a good idea, at least. It’d look a hell of a lot better on my floor.”

“Can I keep the hat on?” Roy asks.

“No,” Ed says. “Last thing I want is to get blinded right when we’re getting somewhere. Not only would we have to _stop_ , that’d be the second-most awkward ER visit of my damn life.”

Roy feels that he is smiling, and knows that he probably looks like a lovesick loon—which is fair, both because he is; and because he intends to stay that way for as long as humanly possible. “What was the first?”

Ed grimaces. “Winry dared me to do a backflip off of somebody’s second-story balcony railing into a pool.”

“And you did it,” Roy says.

“Of course I did it,” Ed says. “I threw in an extra rotation. The problem was that I didn’t do the physics calculations first, and I hit the bottom and cracked my scapula. Hurt like _hell_ the next day, and then every damn day after that for two solid weeks. ER doctor looked at me like I’d killed a puppy in cold blood. I’m just fucking lucky I didn’t break my head open.”

“You are,” Roy says. “And I am. How much force does that take?”

“Too much,” Ed says. “It wouldn’t’ve been so awkward if I hadn’t been in so much pain that I barely made it out of the pool alive, and then they threw me in the car and drove me right to the hospital in my soaking wet swim trunks. First thing the doctor asked me after he’d gotten the whole story was ‘Did you lose the leg backflipping off of buildings, too?’”

Roy winces.

“Obviously, I said ‘yes’,” Ed says. “I don’t think she believed me, but I think she was sort of grudgingly impressed that I’d committed to it.”

“That sounds like you,” Roy says, and he can’t help smiling even if there is still a lot of the wince left in it.

“Good,” Ed says. “It’d be weird if I didn’t.” He grins again, reaches up, and adjusts the terrible hat. “Happy New Year.”

“Happy New Year,” Roy breathes back.

He doesn’t remember there being any traditions about kissing someone again five minutes _after_ midnight, but there sure ought to be.

  


* * *

  


The anticlimax, of course, is that the bar stays open until two regardless of the occasion—rain or shine, every day of the year except Christmas. Thanksgiving actually started being sort of fun after Vanessa figured out the turkey secrets, and they started force-adopting everyone who came in that night.

There is a part of Roy—specifically, the part that drank too much and ate a weird sandwich doused in sugar and went on an emotional roller-coaster that he wasn’t technically tall enough to ride—which just wants to go into the back room and lie down in a clean-ish corner and take a nap. The rest of him is well-aware that if he didn’t get laughed out of the building before he even managed to fall asleep, he’d wake up with dicks Sharpied on his face that he wouldn’t be able to scrub off before he has to go back to lab, so all in all it isn’t worth the risks.

Ed grabs his hand and drags him over to an unoccupied booth, though, which makes for a very nice compromise. Once they’re seated, Roy can lean his head on Ed’s shoulder—it takes some contortion and some serious slouching, but he manages it—and doze for a while.

Odd dreams ooze in and out of his perception—he wants to compare them to sea foam, or to seeping oil; gleaming and slow; receding and impossible to grasp. Strange fragments. Sherman stalks across his lab bench and knocks his pipette to the floor. He and Alphonse are in a car; he asks repeatedly why Al is driving like a maniac; even in the haze of unconsciousness, he knows that that’s an anomaly. He’s walking down a sidewalk, sensing that he’s near his and Ed’s apartment; the ambitious little weeds and wildflowers springing up in the cracks between the squares of concrete thicken and deepen until he’s walking through a tiny jungle, and the vines are creeping up his limbs, and they start to tighten—

He startles awake when Ed whispers, “Oh, _shit_.”

“What?” Roy manages blearily. He barely remembers where they are—he looks around for the furniture in their living room, or the contours of the bedroom struck out in shadow in the middle of the night, but—

Ah. Yes.

“Sorry,” Ed says. “Shit, I woke you up. Sorry.”

“No,” Roy says. “It’s fine—really. I’ll probably just make it worse for later if I get any real sleep now. What happened?”

“Oh,” Ed says. “Uh.”

He turns the phone screen towards Roy.

Focusing on it takes a few seconds, and then Ed’s text log with Winry stops blurring before Roy’s eyes.

The most recent messages say _OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD ED!!!!!!_ , followed by Ed’s not-at-all-unsurprising series of question marks with a few exclamation points interspersed for good measure, followed by a photo of Winry’s left hand. On her third finger, she is wearing a ring with a diamond the size of a small meteorite.

“Well,” Roy says. “‘Oh, _shit_ ’ is about right.”

Ed stares at his phone in what appears to be a combination of horror and delight. “It’s… holy crap. What the hell am I even supposed to say?”

“‘Congratulations’ is usually a good start,” Roy says.

“She’ll know that that’s from you,” Ed says. “So what should _I_ say?”

“Ask her if you have to dress up for the wedding,” Roy says. He’s still looking at the screen of Ed’s phone, so it takes a few seconds of silence for him to look up and notice Ed staring at him. “What?”

“Why,” Ed says, “do you know me better than I know me?”

Roy kisses his cheek before he can escape. “Because I’m very, very lucky. Doesn’t matter what you send her; she’s going to be flipping out so much that I’m not sure she’ll be literate for a few more hours yet.”

“Jeez,” Ed says. He hesitates for another moment, and then he puts both thumbs to his screen. “Okay. Um… how about if I start with ‘nice’ and a thumbs-up emoji and wait for her to get mad at me for under-reacting or whatever?”

“Excellent,” Roy says.

  


* * *

  


Ed riles Winry up so well that she ends up FaceTiming them, at which point talking her down and congratulating her again and confirming that Al and her grandmother have also received the important memo takes a little while. She only cries once. It occurs to Roy that Treavisor will _probably_ put his full name on the wedding invitations, if the rest of them can hold out that long.

At one thirty, Roy goes to help Vanessa clean up the kitchen; at one forty-five, he hears Chris make the last call for the stragglers who haven’t left yet. Some of them are still partying because they don’t want to stop celebrating; some of them are still drinking alone in a corner because they don’t want to go home.

Closing up and running the tills hasn’t changed a whit in the years since Roy stopped coming back: the way that his muscle memory shudders back into prominence and controls his movements feels strange and nostalgic and almost-warm. They’re locked up and totaled out by two twenty-one.

Maddie, Ari, and Vanessa hold one of their traditional informal competitions to see who can come the closest to breaking Roy’s ribs with a parting hug, and then once they’ve puttered off down the silent street, Roy calls an Uber to take himself and Ed and Chris back to the apartment. A part of him wants to think of it as _home_ , but he spent so long letting go of that in concept that he can’t quite force the word to fit it anymore.

Roy doesn’t remember much about the trip in the way of details—streetlamps strike sparks on Ed’s hair; Aunt Chris tells the Uber driver a joke that Roy doesn’t hear that garners a genuine-sounding laugh. Through the window, he notices a neon sign for a retro-looking ice cream place that didn’t exist the last time he was here. Maybe he should take Ed there tomorrow. They could split a milkshake with two red-and-white-striped straws. That would probably work for a grand total of five minutes before Roy tried to lick a spoon seductively, and Ed started laughing so hard that he got milkshake up his nose. Do milkshakes count as milk? Roy’s pretty sure that they’re classified as ice cream instead of Bad Dairy, but he’ll have to ask. He doesn’t want to open that can of worms in front of Chris, though; on top of which he doesn’t really want to _talk_. It can wait for morning. Most things can.

Ed seems to sense that Roy’s brain is floating somewhere outside of his skull and drifting dangerously close to the spindly, spiky-limbed trees at intervals; he grabs Roy’s hand once they’re out of the car and starts towing him in the direction of the apartment. Roy needs to remember to tip on the Uber app. Roy needs to remember to walk. Roy needs to remember quite a lot of things for almost three in the morning. Roy’s not sure that he likes New Year’s Eve anymore. Honestly, Roy’s not sure that he likes anything in the entire world, with the obvious and very pronounced exception of Ed. He likes Ed quite a lot.

He likes Ed slightly less when he has suffered through some highly dexterity-challenged teeth-brushing only for Ed to say, “Okay, now do it again. But way, way better this time.”

The bathroom in the apartment feels even smaller than he remembered with two people in it, but it’s not really any less-roomy than the one they have back home. The mirror is clean enough to glare at people in, though, which is the important thing.

“I mean it,” Ed says. He grins, spits, and grins again, the little _demon_ ; he knows Roy’s weak. “I don’t want you breathin’ in my face all night if your exhaled carbon dioxide still smells like whiskey.”

“If it smells like anything,” Roy says, “it’ll probably smell like French toast.”

“Is that supposed to make it better?” Ed says.

“French toast and spearmint,” Roy says. “Let’s open a restaurant.”

“Let’s start with sleeping,” Ed says.

“You make a compelling argument,” Roy says.

Ed’s grinning again. How dare he? “Can I have that in writing? Or on a shirt?”

“You can get a tattoo,” Roy says, “to match my _Edward Elric is my main squeeze_ one.”

“Gross,” Ed says. “Hurry up; I wanna sleep.”

“Yes, dear,” Roy says.

Ed rolls his eyes so hard that it’s a wonder that he doesn’t pass out.

  


* * *

  


Roy had figured that his old room would bear very little resemblance to the way he remembered it: for one thing, he’d stripped down all of the band posters and scenic photos and the rest of the personality before he’d officially moved out. For another, he took the books that he loved the most to grad school, and he sold off the rest. Chris has started to use it as more of a storage space than anything else, by the looks of it—Roy knows that he should just be grateful that she hasn’t moved into a smaller apartment now that she doesn’t have anyone sleeping regularly in the second room, and he _is_ , but there’s still something unsettling about the feeling that his years-long presence here has mostly been erased.

That said, it definitely has some advantages: several of the boxes stacked up into towers look like they contain alcohol that there wasn’t room to store over at the bar, so if it comes right down to it, he has easy access to some high-quality relief overnight.

The bed, however, is—as Roy had factually known but somehow not concretely expected—very small.

“I could sleep on the floor,” Roy says. “I can’t believe I even thought it—here, just move for a second; I’ll get out—”

“Lie your ass down,” Ed says, but the part of Roy that wants to argue the semantics of that particular command is small. “Al’n I shared beds a lot smaller than this.”

Roy attempts to merge with the wall to make more room. “When you were kids?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.

“I dare to imagine,” Roy says, “that you present _slightly_ more surface area than you did then, so—”

Ed laughs, prods him with a fingertip, and settles down. Under other circumstances—for instance, circumstances where this involved only cuddling and chatting and not the prospect of attempting to sleep—this would be very pleasant. Roy likes having Ed’s shoulder against his and feeling the heat radiate off of Ed’s whole body inches away.

But it’s three in the morning, and Chris will probably want to ‘do something’ tomorrow, and Roy is already tasting the tip of a hangover.

“I mean it,” he says. “I’ll just throw some pillows on the floor. It’s not like it’s going to be cold. It hasn’t been cold here since the Cretaceous.”

“I’m gonna look that up,” Ed says. “Climate patterns. Will you _relax_? It’s fine. Save some martyrdom for morning; it always looks better in natural light.”

“I’m flattered that you’re worried about the aesthetics of my suffering,” Roy says.

Ed barely has to move to pat his arm. “Always.”

Roy’s not sure what he’s teeteringly anxious about, which of course increases the teetering in imminence and intensity. They’re both so damn tired that the close quarters probably won’t be an issue; they actually have a leg up—or, more specifically, one leg down, since they’ve removed a limb that would normally require bed space with them. It’s not that Roy ever feels _awkward_ with Ed, or not precisely. It’s just that he so often feels like… more than he ought to be. More trouble; more energy; more space.

Ah. That’s it, isn’t it? He feels like he doesn’t deserve the space that he occupies. He doesn’t feel like the ends of his life have justified the means, or the meaning, or the going-about of all of it. He doesn’t feel permitted to impose on others, ever. He wants his existence to be as low-impact as possible at all times. He is, tonight, fairly literally backed into a corner where he has no choice but to take up space that he doesn’t feel entitled to.

“Roy,” Ed says.

Ed doesn’t address him by his given name all that often—usually Ed just starts talking and assumes that Roy will listen, which is invariably true. When he does, though, he has a way of curling his tongue around the _R_ that strangely doesn’t happen when he says it in conversation, or as part of a sentence. It only comes out when he’s specifically angling for Roy’s attention, and it’s _devastating_.

“Edward,” Roy says, because at least it’s a game that two can play, even if he’s woefully unstrategic and constantly seems to be losing all his pieces.

“Shut up,” Ed says. “And talk.”

A pause.

“Wait,” Ed says. “You—fuck it. You know what I mean. It’s late, okay?”

“It is,” Roy says. “Which is why I want you to get some sleep instead of…”

His brain has helpfully provided a variety of ways to finish that sentence, each of which is whinier and more pathetic than the last.

“Bein’ your fuckin’ boyfriend?” Ed suggests, which was not on Roy’s list.

“I’m fairly sure that I’ve seen you do both simultaneously before,” Roy says.

“Fair,” Ed says. “How about _acting_ like your fuckin’ boyfriend.”

“You do that on a semi-perpetual basis, too,” Roy says. “It’s a function of the fundamental identity-based nature of the position, so—”

The sheets rustle as Ed extends a hand and very gently brushes Roy’s hair back off of his forehead. His fingertips linger there for a moment, then two; and then they sweep down Roy’s temple and slowly slide along his jaw. Roy’s skin tingles. His heart sings. It’s awful, and it’s sheer bliss.

Ed has never been what even a charitable soul would call _touchy-feely_ —he and Al are relentlessly affectionate, but in the sense that they’re so close together that their existences overlap, and a natural manifestation of sharing space is bumping shoulders and nudging elbows, with some gentle shoves and moderately antagonistic hair-ruffling here and there.

The concept, though, of touching another human being in tenderness—of touching for its own sake—has taken some acclimation. Ed has always leaned directly in towards Roy’s compulsion to have, at the very least, fingertips near to him at every possible opportunity, so Roy knew it wasn’t that Ed _disliked_ it, but when this started, he really hadn’t seemed to have much of an instinct for generating it himself. If it didn’t arise organically, with the cosmic magnetism Ed and Al had towards each other, he didn’t quite seem to know where to begin.

But he’s… changing. Over time. Roy has noticed him watching carefully—with the same ferocious focus that he applies to experiments in lab—a few times when Roy had flung an arm out to graze the small of his back or his shoulder or his wrist in passing, just for the simple pleasure of it. Roy had said nothing; done nothing—just waited, and kept his own habits, and wondered if Ed was observing to acquire data, and acquiring data to draw up a hypothesis, and drawing up a hypothesis in order to act on it. He wondered if Ed liked it enough to want to learn.

Roy had been on the money about that much, and to say that Ed is an enormously quick study is somewhat like commenting that space is rather large and quiet. And it’s wonderful. So much of this is.

These are the things that Roy has to remember—that sometimes things go absolutely right even without your interference. That sometimes the world is genuinely kind.

“Hey,” Ed says. He scrabbles under the bedcovers for Roy’s hand, which doesn’t take long given that they have a grand total of about an inch of space between them. “What are you thinking about so hard?”

“Nothing useful,” Roy says. “You should get some sleep. I’ve already—”

Ed squeezes his hand. “Tell me. I mean—if you want to. _You’re_ not gonna be able to sleep until you do.”

“It’s not…” Roy swallows, which doesn’t help; he tries running his tongue over his lip, which doesn’t help either. His brain’s too fuzzy. His chest’s too tight. “It’s not that I don’t _want_ to so much as that I… shouldn’t. Some of the… I don’t ever want you to feel… trapped. Or obligated. Or coerced, or manipulated, or cornered, or—”

“There you go again,” Ed says, but he’s squeezing harder now, and then running the pad of his thumb over Roy’s knuckles. “I’m a big boy, Roy.”

“Well,” Roy says.

“Shut your goddamn mouth,” Ed says, but Roy can hear the hint of a laugh in his voice. “You—what I _mean_ is, I can handle it. I promise.”

Roy listens to them both breathing for a few seconds. “I… it’s so… selfish.”

“I bet it’s not,” Ed says.

Roy works the words around in his mouth some more, but their shapes don’t change. “I don’t want to burden you with—”

“You’re _not_ ,” Ed says. “C’mon. Hit me with it. Please.”

“Kinky,” Roy says.

“ _Mustang_ ,” Ed says.

Roy takes a deeper breath this time. “I—if—you’re sure. All right. I just—I’m sorry. In advance.”

“Roy,” Ed says.

“I am,” Roy says. Funny how the truest words always have the sharpest edges, and they hack at you every centimeter of the way up your throat. “It’s just—sometimes I miss you when you’re right here, because I’m just so _sure_ that someday you’re going to outgrow me, and you’re going to leave.” He tries swallowing again. Doesn’t help much. “Probably someday soon.”

“Roy,” Ed says slowly.

“I don’t want to smother you,” Roy says. “I know—I know I’m… I know that I ask a lot.” He hears Ed’s intake of breath to argue. “Not out loud—not in so many words, maybe. But I do. I need a lot. I need a lot _from_ you. I know that. And I just—I hope you know that it’s not… that I’m just… grateful. I know how lucky I am. I really do. I wouldn’t ever hold it against you—leaving. You’ve already given me so much.”

Silence settles for long enough that he gets a good, long, detailed taste of all the blood in his throat.

“Are you done?” Ed asks.

“I could keep going,” Roy says.

“You shouldn’t,” Ed says. “Because you’re wrong.”

“I’m sorry,” Roy says. “I’m a maudlin drunk.”

“You’re a very well-preserved _Thesaurus Rex_ , is what you are,” Ed says. “I don’t even know what that word means.”

“Overly sentimental,” Roy says.

“Okay,” Ed says. “Then you are a maudlin drunk. But you’re _my_ maudlin drunk, and that’s the way I like it, and that’s the way I like you.” He swallows. “Listen. You don’t have to… change. You don’t have to make yourself less, or try to fit somebody else’s definition of ‘better’, or… I mean, yeah. Some days, everybody’s a lot. We all get rough ones where we need help sometimes. But you’re not _too_ much. You’re never too much. You’re exactly the right amount, as far as I’m concerned. Good luck saying something that makes me want to leave.”

“ATM machine,” Roy says. “PIN number. HIV virus.”

Ed shoves him, but nowhere near as hard as he deserves.

“You know what they say about life,” Ed says.

Roy forces a little bit of a smile. “That it’s a bitch, and then you die?”

“Well,” Ed says, “yeah, I guess, honestly. But I was more thinking of the other one.”

“Which?” Roy asks.

“‘Life is tough, my darling’,” Ed says, “‘but so are you’.”

Roy takes the lengths of a few breaths to assess the state of his cardiovascular system. He thinks his heart may have just exploded. That’s going to be tricky to clean up.

“You just called me ‘darling’,” he says.

“No, I didn’t,” Ed says. “I was quoting.”

“You did,” Roy says. He rolls up onto one elbow, and Ed tries to wriggle away towards the edge of the bed, but the damn thing’s so small that there’s nowhere to go. “You called me ‘darling’, my sweetie-pie sugarlump honeybun schmoopy-face precious little—”

“ _Little_?” Ed says, writhing away from where Roy’s trying to nuzzle at his ear in the dark and keeps hitting hair. “The fuck—what even is a schmoopy-face? Don’t answer that. I was _paraphrasing_. Why are you like this?”

“Haven’t figured out any other way to be,” Roy says, dropping back down to the bed. “Not for lack of trying.”

“You know what’s the worst part?” Ed says.

Roy makes a noise that he hopes sounds curious. His head rings. He would like to be like something else; anything else.

“I _think_ ,” Ed says, “that those are a less-bad idea than your ass tattoo.”

Roy almost manages to laugh at that one.

Ed squeezes his hand. Main-squeezes it, one might even say, if one was very tired and slightly deranged.

“Are you okay?” Ed asks.

Ed is training him into honesty with methods that Pavlov would approve of, which sometimes consist of food- and/or affection-based rewards—which might be subtle if Edward Elric had ever managed subtlety in his beautiful life.

The methods also sometimes follow a simpler negative reinforcement course of gently calling Roy out on his bullshit until he caves.

“Not quite,” Roy says. “But close.”

Ed squeezes harder. “Close enough to sleep, or do you need a couple’a minutes?”

“Sleep,” Roy says, which likely marks it as the single most intelligent thing that he’s said since they left their apartment this morning.

“C’mere,” Ed says, and his fingers curl into the collar of Roy’s T-shirt to drag him in for a sleepy, messy, cataclysmically sweet goodnight kiss.

“Sleep well,” Roy says. The other words—the bigger words, the truest words—dance around on the tip of his tongue until their feet start to prickle, and the impulse to spit them out overcomes his better judgment. He never wants them to get old; he never wants them to sound stale; he tries to build them into every action instead of speaking them until they come out tired and rote and clichéd, but sometimes… sometimes he doesn’t have much choice. Sometimes the truth is all there is. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Ed says. 

Roy’s mouth is now two for two as far as getting the better of him in this tiny bed. “Are you sure?”

“Pinky swear,” Ed says. He catches Roy’s hand under the sheets again and twists their fingers together. “Cross my heart and hope to die, etcetera and so on and all that jazz.”

“I’m a mess,” Roy says.

“We’re all a mess,” Ed says. “Everybody I’ve ever met is a mess. Some people just hide it real well.”

“You can do better,” Roy says, and that one fucking _hurts_ , but the truth is all—

“I fundamentally disagree with your theoretical premise,” Ed says, “but even if you really think that, then… tough shit. I want _you_. And I want the messy parts most of all. So get some sleep. But wake me up if you need to talk or anything, okay? I mean it.”

“I don’t know how you’re possible,” Roy says.

“Sure you do,” Ed says. “Spite, caffeine, and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”

“With lime,” Roy says.

“With lime,” Ed says.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would apologize for the fact that I've sent Ed to the zoo in two separate fics within a few months… but the first problem with that is that I wrote this one a long time ago and then just neglected it; and the second problem with that is that zoos are great. And zookeepers are great. Or at least the ones that I'm friends with are! ♥
> 
> Anyway, as you probably noticed, I forgot that this fic existed yet again, and I am SO SORRY.
> 
> That said, I did not, and never, forget about you. Yes, you – any reader and all readers, of this series in particular.
> 
> This series has resonated with people in ways and to a degree that I never imagined when I wrote it. It's one of those weird situations where I'm so, so happy that people have been able to see themselves, and sometimes have been able to gain hope and strength from that; and where I'm also so profoundly sad that so many people feel or have felt this way, and don't _get_ to see that very often.
> 
> I know that positivity feels cheap and optimism runs right off when shit gets bad. And I know that it's hard to remember, and it hurts to try – but you are more than the bad shit. You _are_. I know that it gets indescribably exhausting to carry it; I know that it starts to be impossible to imagine a world where it doesn't define you.
> 
> But it doesn't. And it can't. You are so much more. There is a world out there with beautiful stuff in it, which you _deserve_. I believe that.
> 
> I honestly can't express how much the love for this series has mattered to me over the years. I see you all. I'm with you. You are capable of small things, and great things, and wonderful things. Your brain is going to lie to you sometimes, and that's not your fault. Doing the best that you can counts for everything. ♥
> 
> …gooey rant over, I promise. Take care of yourselves and each other out there, okay? ♥

Morning comes much too soon and much too brightly.

Roy goes back to sleep.

Late morning does the same thing, and has rarely felt quite so early as it does this time around.

Roy does not think that he would like to repeat the experience of ringing in the new year with a bad leg cramp, a backache, and a hell of a hangover.

“Ow,” Ed says.

“Tonight I’m sleeping on the floor,” Roy says.

“No,” Ed says. “Jesus, I feel like a vampire.”

The very elegant, not-so-artfully-asymmetrical-because-he-couldn’t-cut-them-straight black scrap fabric window dressings that Roy had tacked up over the mediocre blinds have also disappeared since he moved out. He misses them with his whole soul.

“Well,” Roy says. “You can suck on me any time you like.”

Ed laughs weakly and elbows him gently. “Dunno what I expected. G’morning.”

Even here, and now, and dying, it is a joy to wake up beside him.

“Good morning,” Roy says. “Are you feeling lucky?”

Ed pauses in sitting up and scrubbing at his eyes to give Roy a look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like,” Roy says. “I have no idea if Aunt Chris has anything remotely edible in the place. You want to go check?”

Ed returns to the eye-scrubbing. “Guess it’s worth a shot.”

  


* * *

  


There is nothing edible in the fridge, or the pantry, or the cabinets. Chris emerges from her bedroom in her bathrobe with an unlit cigarette at the corner of her mouth, smirks, shrugs, and proceeds to the balcony to smoke.

The upshot is that the nice Korean lady at the corner bakery still recognizes Roy, and also has a very quiet voice that makes their small-talk conversation about her kids and his life both possible and moderately pleasant. It is distinctly possible that the new year is trying to apologize to him for beginning with the wrong sort of bang.

Coffee helps enormously. Pastries don’t hurt, and Roy’s supposed to eat something before he takes his medication anyway. He hopes that the fact that it barely still counts as morning won’t be held against him by his brain chemistry, but given how vengeful it tends to be in general, he won’t be holding his breath.

Ed downs his coffee so soon and so swiftly as they walk back that it’s a miracle that there’s anything left of his esophagus by now. Then he crams a very large bite of a very large donut into his mouth and says “So what d’you want to do today?”

“I _want_ to go back to sleep,” Roy says, and leaves off _With all available limbs wrapped around you if possible_ so that he won’t garner them any side-eyes from passersby; “but the only thing that I want more than that is not to piss off Aunt Chris, so there are probably a few activities in our future.”

Ed wrinkles his nose. He still has his mouth full of donut and is actively chewing, but Roy wants to kiss him anyway. “Guess that’s fair. She hasn’t seen you in a while, and she probably wants to give me the third degree and ask if I have an inheritance and make sure that I’m good enough for you and whatever. You know if she’s got anything in mind?”

It takes Roy several seconds to process Ed’s second sentence. “Um… not… sure. Maybe a museum. Or the zoo. Probably depends on what’s open.”

“Cool,” Ed says. “I like learning stuff.”

As understatements go, that’s rather like saying that magma’s warm.

“Do they have an aquarium?” Ed says. “At the zoo, I mean. Or at a museum. I’m not gonna judge. I’d put an aquarium in our apartment if I could afford it.”

Roy wants very badly to say _Someday_ , but he hates the ever-growing weight of promises that he knows he can’t keep. “It will probably surprise you not at all to know that it’s been a very long time since she and I bothered with that sort of thing. She’s just trying to make us look like a normal family so that you don’t run screaming before she’s even gotten a chance to torture you properly.”

Ed grins through another tremendous bite of donut. “Oh, yeah? Bring it the fuck on.”

  


* * *

  


The zoo is bigger than Roy remembered, which seems counterintuitive. He would have expected it to feel significantly smaller, since he’s about twice as tall as he was the last time they visited, and he takes much longer strides. Perhaps it’s a matter of energy expenditure? He vaguely recalls an era as a child where he was bursting with gumption and actually felt _awake_ —an eon that he spent running places even when it wasn’t necessary and bouncing in place and playing very extreme rounds of hide-and-seek with Riza at the park. They were both so good that they ruined each other for playing with anyone else. She once got up on top of the building where the bathrooms were housed, managing to conceal herself behind the slant of the roof, and he had to clamber halfway up the drain pipe on the side to be able to spot her, and that was about when they’d gotten caught by the park ranger.

Unsurprisingly, Riza’s father hadn’t picked up when they’d called him to come collect his tiny miscreant; Chris had laughed so loudly that Roy had been able to hear her through the phone from the other side of the ranger’s office. When she’d come to pick them up, she’d done an abysmally poor job of pretending to be angry at them, snickering all the while, and then taken them back to the car and given them juice boxes. It’s very possible that she said something encouraging them fight authority in all of its insidious forms, but Roy only remembers that his juice box was berry-flavored, and it tasted delicious. Chris was somewhat less delighted when she’d noticed that he’d cut his hand on the pipe, but she’d sighed and said “At least you’ve have your shots.”

Ed really likes the big cats, which Roy thinks he might have predicted if he’d thought about it. The tiger is feeling energetic enough today to be pacing back and forth in its enclosure, and Ed is leaned halfway over the outer fence, watching in utter rapture. Several schoolchildren have clustered next to him, and he keeps turning to them and pointing and gesturing, presumably regaling them with tiger facts that his capacious brain has stored up for just such an occasion. Roy’s heart feels so full that it hurts again. One of these days when he’s feeling self-destructive, he’ll mention how disproportionate it is that Ed takes up so much space in his emotions.

“It’s funny,” Chris says. “Didn’t figure on you falling in love on me. I thought Ari was the one I had to worry about.”

“At least I’m doing better than the first time,” Roy says.

Chris grimaces. “That’s true. How’s he doing?”

“Great,” Roy says. “Beautiful dream life; beautiful dream family; Oregon real estate prices.”

“Clever bastard,” Chris says. She nods to Ed, who is making a hilarious and adorably over-the-top motion with both hands to try to explain something to a gawping eight-year-old. “So what about you and this one?”

“What about us, what?” Roy says.

“I need to know in advance if you’re gonna get hitched,” Chris says, and Roy instantly and glamorously chokes on his own spit. “Gotta scrounge up some money to pay for part of it and all that.”

“Wh—” The spit is persistent. Roy coughs several times into his sleeve, wheezes several times more, and then manages: “I would—I don’t think it’s—and anyway, I would _never_ ask that of you. I couldn’t.”

“I know,” Chris says. She’s wearing a puffy jacket that isn’t remotely necessary for the low-end-of-balmly day that the greater Los Angeles metroplex has dealt them, and he can see her rotating the pack of cigarettes in her pocket thoughtfully. “But you and the girls are all I’ve got. What the hell else am I doing any of this for if it’s not to help the lot of you punks live better and be happier, right?”

Roy has something stuck in his throat again, but it’s not spit this time. “But—”

“Hush your mouth,” Chris says. “It’s what I want. You wouldn’t deny your dear old world-weary Auntie Chris the chance to spoil you once or twice, would you?”

Roy still has the admission ticket that she paid for burning a hole in his pocket. “What do you call what you’re doing right now?”

“An appetizer,” Chris says. “Pretty measly one, though. Bruschetta, probably. They never give you enough. You know that I’m proud of you, right?”

Roy spends several moments wondering if he’s alive at this precise moment. It doesn’t particularly feel like it. His fingertips seem very distant, and his skin feels slightly cold, and his head spins like the zoo-animal-themed carousel that they passed on the way in. “I—”

“I mean it,” Chris says. “All this shit you’ve done—I never would’ve dreamed you’d be out there doing all that. Making scientific advances. Publishing papers. Getting a doctorate. Nobody in this family ever would’ve believed it, and I’m proud of you. I’m humbled to think I had any part in how much you’ve done and how far you’ve come. I bet it’s a hell of a lot more work than you ever let on. And I’m proud of you. I know your mom would be, too—she believed from day one that you could do anything you set your mind to. It’d’ve blown your dad’s mind, though. He was the realist. He would’ve told you to get a real job, and I would’ve had to tell him where to shove it.”

Roy cannot cry in the middle of the zoo. He can’t. It’s just not done. There are children everywhere. The tiger would feel awkward. Ed would have to stop enjoying himself and start focusing on Roy’s stupid melodrama-pain again.

“Thank you,” he forces out. It almost sounds steady. “I wouldn’t—I hope you know I couldn’t’ve done any of it without you. None of it.”

“Give yourself some credit, kiddo,” Chris says. “You’re stronger than you think you are.”

“Inherited that from you,” Roy says.

Chris’s eyes gleam just a tiny bit, so at least if Roy cries in the middle of the goddamn zoo, he might not be the only one.

  


* * *

  


Chris takes them out to an early dinner before the bar is due to open. Roy tries to protest that whatever they have at home is fine, forgetting in his politesse that the fridge had been so woefully devoid of edible items that morning that they’d had to bail.

It ends up being nice, though. Chris tells Ed that she wants to get to know him better, and he misses the significant look that she shoots at Roy, and Ed talks at some length about his research and then at greater length about Al. It doesn’t matter in the slightest that Roy has heard all the stories before—and participated in a handful of them—because he could happily _watch_ Ed talk all night without ever hearing a thing. Ed has a way of speaking on any topic that draws you in like a supermagnet and holds you fixed until he sits back and laughs nervously and says “Shit, sorry, didn’t mean to monopolize the conversation.”

“No, not at all,” Chris says. She’s set an elbow on the table and her chin on her hand, which is a sure sign that she’s succumbed to the Ed Charm Black Hole. “Brothers are the universe’s gift to us. At least when they’re not being a colossal pain in the ass.”

“I’m not sure that’s what Maddie would say about me,” Roy says.

Chris smirks. “She’d say the ‘pain in the ass’ part.”

Roy leans back in his seat and tries to look as beleaguered as possible. “That’s…” Well. “…fair, I guess.”

“You did dye her hair orange that one time,” Chris says.

“It was an accident,” Roy says.

Chris clicks her tongue. “It was still orange.”

“Is that what inspired you to go into chemistry?” Ed asks.

“It’s what inspired me _not_ to go into hairdressing,” Roy says.

“There’s still time to quit the PhD program and enroll as a beautician,” Ed says, grinning at him. “You really gonna let one orange-hair incident get in the way of your dreams?”

“More like my nightmares,” Roy says. “How about this—if you want me to go into cosmetology, you have to let me practice on you daily. Only seems fair.”

Ed’s expression answers that one.

“You could practice on Al,” Ed says. “He’d love the attention, and he’d look good no matter what you did to him.”

“I’m not sure even Al could make orange hair look good,” Roy says.

“You underestimate his power,” Ed says. “He wanted to be a tree for Halloween once when we were kids—which I was confused about, because he’d always wanted to be a cat, but then I realized that he wanted to be a tree that a bunch of cats had _climbed_. We stuck a bunch of little stuffed cats to him. Anyway, before that, we spray-dyed his hair green with that terrible crap you get at the drugstore, but he still looked cute as a damn button. It’s uncanny.”

“It’s the smile,” Roy says. “You do it, too.”

This expression says everything that Ed thinks about _that_.

“I understand now,” Chris says, “why Maddie said you two were a nausea hazard.”

Ed’s eyes go round. “I mean—yeah, it’s terrible, but on the other hand, ‘nausea hazard’ would make _such_ a good T-shirt.”

Chris turns to Roy and holds her hands out, palms up, in a remarkably sarcastic gesture of benevolence. “There you go, kiddo. Takes care of the next birthday present. You’re welcome.”

Roy gives Ed a look, and Ed smirks back, and this part is what he always hopes for and never thinks he’ll get.

  


* * *

  


They help Chris and the girls get things going at the bar. She shoes them out early so that they can head back to the apartment for some sleep before their trip tomorrow—early enough that it’s only just dark, and it’s cool enough outside to walk the whole way.

“You sure it’s okay?” Roy asks for the second or third—he hopes it’s only second or third—time as they finish out another block. “We could always Uber it from here.”

“I’m sure,” Ed says. “I promise. I used to have to hoof it clear across campus when I was TAing O-Chem.”

Roy tries not to watch him with enough concern to cross over into overbearing territory. “Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s comfortable.”

“It’s fine,” Ed says. “It’s good, actually. It’s a pretty nice night, and we’re gonna be cooped up in a car all day tomorrow.”

He reaches for Roy’s hand—in public, in broad not-so-daylight, in a city full of strangers, entirely of his own volition. He wriggles his fingers. Roy has to force his brain to recalibrate itself before he can reach back and grab hold and hang on tight.

It’s worth it, of course. Ed always is. And Ed is always there for him like this, and Ed…

“I mean it,” Ed says. “Stop worrying about me. Distracts me from worrying about you.”

“My nefarious master plan has been revealed,” Roy says. “Curses, foiled again.”

Ed squeezes his hand. “Everybody needs a hobby. Could do worse than foiling nefarious plans.”

“Could do a lot worse,” Roy says, squeezing back. “Do you mind if we stop at the store and buy her some groceries? And maybe a thing or two for ourselves for tomorrow morning, now that I think about it.”

Ed grins. “That’s a nefarious plan I can get behind.”

  


* * *

  


Ed almost invariably falls asleep faster than he does—Ed almost invariably drops off about forty-five seconds after his head hits the pillow, going rag-doll limp and softly-breathing; either with his cheek smushed against the pillow, or on his back with one arm crooked across himself.

Roy, however, tends to spend the better part of half an hour rewinding through all of the things that he wishes that he hadn’t done on any given day. Sometimes, if he’s tired enough—which is increasingly frequently—he manages to coax himself into calmness slightly faster, and he can shut down his brain from there, but it usually has to run like a hamster on a wheel for a while.

Tonight, like most nights, Ed’s out like a light.

Unlike most nights, though, he’s curled up on his side with his forehead pressed to Roy’s chest and Roy’s fingers stroking through his hair when his breathing evens out, and his face relaxes in the sliver of anemic grayish-orange light from the streetlamp outside. It’s probably mostly a function of the cramped little bed, but in a strange way Roy feels like they’re slightly closer now than they were when they left home. There’s something about baring your past to someone—they checked off the backstory part right at the beginning, sure, but show and tell are miles apart. Inviting someone directly into the crucible where you were formed, for better or worse or awkward or unsettling, is a different level of leap of faith.

Ed has always trusted Roy with everything in him. Ed’s like that, no matter how many times he gets burned. Ed meets the world head-on, full-force, with a shout of _Take me as I am or fucking leave me_ and a whisper of _Please don’t leave_. The only thing about him that Roy would ever dream of changing is the Cheeto diet, and that’s not even because of the suspiciously radioactive-looking red dust that ends up coating Ed’s precious fingertips. Roy wants him to live forever, and no matter what Ed claims to believe about the health properties of spicy things, Roy is _positive_ that the nutrition facts panel on a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos with Lime will display alarming numbers, and potentially a surgeon general’s warning about adorable ulcers.

Roy smoothes Ed’s hair a few more times before draping that arm very gently over him and trying to settle there. His hand will probably fall asleep before he does, but it’s difficult to quibble when so many things are just so… good.

Feeling like this terrifies him—it’s like the edge of the cliff face all over again; he can see the bottom, and the rocks, and those are so much more familiar than the fresh whiff of the breeze and the progress of the waves and the beautiful view and the comfort of Ed’s company. He always feels like he’s prying contentment out of the jaws of his own habits—like he’s renting it, and the interest rate will come back and bankrupt him one of these days.

That probably doesn’t help any of this, come to think of it. He’s scared of being happy, because he lives in constant fear of the moment that he’ll come back down, and it’ll hurt so much worse to strike the low point when he’s experienced just how good it can be. It’s safer to stay numb, but after a while it saps the colors out of every single frame of his vision, and he just has to risk paying the price for a spectrum that takes his breath away.

Roy grazes his palm very gently up and down Ed’s arm. Ed sighs softly in his sleep and nestles slightly closer. Roy smiles, and he closes his eyes. They’ll have an actual breakfast tomorrow, and then they’ll go home, and Al will probably have baked at least two more batches of cupcakes and try to foist several dozen off on them, and life will go on. And life will be good. Not easy; not simple; not always. But manageable, most times; and extricable, most days; and worth it, every one.

  


* * *

  


When Roy’s eyes open the next morning, his first discernible feeling is a vague sense of surprise. He’d expected that Chris coming back in around three in the morning would have woken him, but he can’t remember any disruptions of what feels like an unusually solid amount of sleep.

It must have been unusually uneventful, at the very least—Roy doesn’t seem to have moved a muscle over the course of the night. That’s a good thing, since he’d curled his left arm up in the very small space between himself and Ed. That one’s completely numb, as is everything south of his wrist in the arm that he draped over Ed’s side before he drifted off. One of his knees is touching Ed’s, which has created one of those terrible little pools of intense warmth that summon sweat even though most of the rest of him isn’t quite so overheated.

Ed’s face is so relaxed in sleep that he’s even more mesmerizing than normal. His eyelashes cast gorgeous little fan-shadows on his cheeks, and his exhalations have just a tiny bit of a catch to them—not quite a snore, but a touch thicker than an ordinary breath. Roy hopes that he isn’t getting sick. He always tries to muscle his way through it and ends up making himself worse before he’s miserable enough to let Roy coddle him.

Roy should find a way to trick him into accepting coddling on less-dire occasions, come to think of it. Ed’s birthday is coming up. Maybe Roy can conspire with Al to set something up—convince him to leave lab early; be waiting at home with food followed by a hot bath followed by a movie followed by hot cocoa and cuddling on the couch. Roy may have to run the proposed agenda by Al first; that certainly sounds like _his_ ideal birthday date, but Ed probably wants to see Al for some part of it, and Winry if she’s available, and he might prefer to do something exciting. Like… a hands-on beginner’s course for roller derby. That sounds very Ed, although Roy’s not sure if the prosthetic would be up to that particular combination of balancing challenges and collisions. Maybe something less dangerous, but still with some adrenaline—would an action movie in the theaters be enough, or is Roy going to have to scrape up the cash for tickets to an amusement park? He has to consider the perks of that one, which include Ed with windswept hair, and Ed eating ice cream out of season and licking the spoon obscenely, and Ed wanting to go on water rides and getting soaked and having his shirt cling to him. It might also feature Ed and Winry nearly killing each other over carnival games that weren’t actually designed to be competitive; and _possibly_ Ed grabbing for Roy’s hand or his arm if they find a spooky ride with a jump-scare; and shelling out cash for one of the overpriced ride photos of their little cadre making supremely unflattering faces. A day like that would be a gift for all of them. Maybe—

One of their phones vibrates on the nightstand, and the chipped particle board manages to magnify the sound.

Ed, the paragon of bedheaded beauty, the idol of Roy’s soul and the jewel of his heart, squints and says, “Unh.”

Poetry.

Ed rolls over, towards the far side of the bed where the cellular culprit awaits. Roy attempts to massage some life back into his excruciatingly pins-and-needles-ridden arm and hands as Ed rolls his shoulders and scrubs his eyes.

“I was dreamin’ about Winry’s wedding,” Ed says, and Roy’s fingertips stop, as does his heart and his breath. It’s too damn early in the morning for this sort of melodrama, but he’s always been told that he’s a natural. “Everything was goin’ all wrong, and she was freakin’ out, and you had your thesis defense scheduled the same day—’cause of course you did; that makes sense, right?—and then Al was callin’ and sayin’ that Sherman had to go to the vet, and the caterer spilled all over your white shirt right before you had to go do your defense, and… yeah. I’m gonna tell her that she’d better get her shit together. And that she should probably invite Sherman right off the bat, ’cause Al’ll want to bring him as a plus-one anyway.”

Roy forces his hands to move. His fingers are responding relatively consistently to the directives from his brain, even if he still can’t feel anything except tingling pain. “Maybe Sherman can be the ringbearer.”

“Don’t ever say that where Al can hear you,” Ed says, stretching over and picking up his phone. “If he gets the idea in his head, he won’t take ‘no’ for an answer, and Winry’ll disown him, and my whole family’ll get broken up.”

“Surely everyone will reconsider,” Roy says, “and stay together for the cat.”

“Winry doesn’t like the cat,” Ed says. “It’s cuter than her sometimes, and she can’t take it.” He blinks at his phone, squints at it, continues to squint while bringing it progressively closer to his face until the tip of his nose nearly brushes the screen, and then abruptly shoves it towards Roy. “Whose number is this?”

After a few seconds’ false start, Roy manages to bully his fingers into curling around the phone—which takes all of his focus until he’s succeeded; only when it’s securely in his hand does he have the spare brainpower to convince his eyes to focus properly, too.

A brand-new text log on Ed’s phone, from a vaguely familiar number in a local area code, displays a surprisingly artful photo of the two of them from New Year’s Eve. The sender must have snagged it instants after their mouths parted, since hardly two inches separate their faces, and they’re gazing at each other with half-lidded eyes and wet-looking mouths. Roy has the extremely stupid sequined hat on, but the way that Ed is reaching up and nudging two of his fingertips at the brim of it makes it look significantly less stupid simply because of Ed’s interest in it.

They look like no one else in the world has ever existed, or ever will; and like nothing else matters; and like nothing will ever tear them apart.

It is way too fucking early in the morning for this.

Roy tries to fix his attention on the number instead of on the fact that the documentation of events in his own damn life can apparently set his heart to aching mercilessly.

“I’m not positive off the top of my head,” he says, “but my money is on Maddie. She’s the nosiest one.” He hands the phone back to Ed, maybe a little more gently than it merits, and reaches over Ed’s shoulder to grab for his own. “Let me cross-reference to be sure, so that we know how rude to be.”

Ed is staring at the phone in his hands. His bangs are a mess. He has a line on his cheek from a crease in the pillow. He is too adorable to encapsulate in words.

All he says is, “Yeah.”

  


* * *

  


They try to stay quiet as they start on breakfast. Roy is usually in charge of most of the more delicate cooking; Ed is excellent at helping with preparations and has a strange special affinity for toast. Toast is typically the only thing that Roy burns—often, and badly—so they complement each other staggeringly well.

Roy made sure they weren’t starting at what would qualify as an unreasonable hour for someone who’d been up half the night tending bar, and they’ve done fairly well at muffling the requisite noises as much as possible, but he still can’t help wincing when the latest slight clatter and grease-hiss heralds the opening of Chris’s bedroom door.

She’s wearing her bathrobe and an arch expression. That’s almost always the way that Roy pictures her in his head—morning-light Chris Mustang, in satin pajamas and house slippers and that worn white robe, with one eyebrow raised and an unlit cigarette at the corner of her mouth. The Chris who’s about to read the comics section of the newspaper and then warn him which ones aren’t funny; the Chris who’s going to help him pack his lunch for school and see him off to the bus and then go back to sleep for a couple hours.

“Who the hell are you,” Chris says from the doorway, “and what have you done with my nephew?”

Roy knows full well that she’s joking, and that it’s actually a veiled compliment, and that he shouldn’t be bothered. “You don’t have to have any if you don’t want, but I figured—”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Chris asks. She pulls a chair out so fast that it scrapes on the linoleum, drops herself into it, and pulls a plate towards herself. “Load me up, whoever you are.”

  


* * *

  


Sitting around the kitchen table eyeing the remnants of the pancakes, slowly drinking coffee, and shooting the shit feels even better than Roy had expected it to. It turns out that there’s still quite a lot of meaningless stuff to talk about—the harmless, pleasant sort of small-talk. The stories about squirrels that rappelled down from a tree and smacked into the window and then got up and looked right at you and then scampered away looking remarkably embarrassed for a rodent that shouldn’t have a concept of shame.

Chris doesn’t say anything when Roy excuses himself—in the vaguest of terms, but he’s fairly sure that they all know that it’s to slip off to the bedroom and take his medication—and she’s giving him a look when he comes back, but she still doesn’t comment.

That’s something, at any rate. Unflinching, unreserved support is probably out of the question for many years yet, but she’s trying. It’s more important to her that he feels safe enough to visit than that he believes her point of view—she cares enough to give it the best she’s got, and that matters. That matters a lot.

“You kids’d better get on the road before you end up in traffic for the rest of your little lives,” she says once they’ve been loitering at the table for long enough that they’ve probably crossed from lounging into laziness. “You need anything else before you go?”

Roy opens his mouth to say _A lobotomy_ , which was his standard response even before it got darkly not-really-funny, and then closes it again.

Ed glances at him. If it was anyone else—anyone that he hadn’t learned, moment after moment and day after day, to trust with his whole heart, without a single second thought—Roy would be slightly alarmed that someone had gotten so good at intuiting his silences.

“I think we’re okay,” Ed says. “We can stop for coffee halfway or something.”

“All right,” Chris says. She reaches out as she stands from the table, which is unusual enough in and of itself, and cuffs a hand at Roy’s shoulder. “Go pack so that I can get you out of my hair already.”

Roy isn’t sure whether he should squirm pointedly or not, so he errs on the side of inaction in the hopes that he won’t make her regret it by playing offended. “I’m delighted to see that the advent of the new year has inspired you with such familial devotion.”

“I just saw you eating nothing but pancakes,” Chris says. “When did you sneak in the dictionaries?”

Ed points at her, looking at Roy. “See? She gets it.”

“Traitor,” Roy says.

Ed grins at him. Little shit knows that Roy would forgive him anything when he smiles like that.

  


* * *

  


Chris walks them down to the parking lot in her slippers and her robe. She lights the cigarette the instant that they’ve stepped out of the door; she doesn’t bother locking it behind them, which makes Roy’s skin crawl, but he guesses that her explanation would be _It’s not like I have anything worth stealing_.

They stand there for a second with their backpacks. Roy doesn’t know what he’s waiting for, exactly. He unlocks the car and tosses his bag into the backseat to fill the silence; he reaches for Ed’s and earns a scrunch-nosed face and a reluctant concession, and then he gets to set Ed’s down next to his.

Chris is looking at him thoughtfully when he straightens up.

Then she extends a hand and fists it in the sleeve of his jacket, and she uses that leverage to haul him into a hug so hard that he thinks her collarbones have damaged his throat for a second, and then that his spine is bruised for several seconds more.

“Don’t be a stranger,” she says. “I mean that, all right? No matter what, no matter when.” She squeezes, which jeopardizes his vertebrae all over again, and then releases him. “Drive safe. Take it easy sometimes, if you can figure out how.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Roy manages.

She reaches for Ed, who doesn’t recognize the danger fast enough to try to escape, and then drags him in and hugs him just as hard.

“You keep taking care of that boy of mine,” she says, “all right?”

Roy’s chest tightens up in a way that he really, really doesn’t like.

Ed is hugging back. It looks like there’s a marginal possibility that Chris has met her match. 

  


* * *

  


The drive feels both strangely intimate and utterly ordinary. Roy supposes that that makes sense: he’s had another layer of his skin stripped away, but Ed’s also borne witness to most of the ones before. It’s a new level of a familiar process. Their hearts are several inches closer now. Every time he thinks that it’s impossible—every time he thinks that they’ve nearly merged—they end up like this.

He tries to remember every single time to be grateful. Ed chooses him, over and over and over again. For all of his flaws, for all of his failings, for all of the sleepless nights and hopeless mornings, they’re still here.

They’re still listening to music that they bought when they were in high school—or that Ed acquired semi-illicit copies of, as quickly comes out; burning CDs for your friends and reviving the concept of the mix tape had been a right of passage at that point—and pointing out all of the billboards that can be taken as innuendos. They’re sill reaching out across the center console and holding hands between the coffee mug in the cupholder and the gearshift. They’re still talking about science, and about life, and about the scenery, and about a weird movie that Ed saw at some friend’s place when he was ten that he remembers fever-dream flashes of.

They pull off the highway and search out a Starbucks just past the halfway point. Roy doesn’t think that he’d mind driving the rest of the way, but he sure would mind having to do it without another caffeine fix. Reciting every single Linkin Park lyric with Ed has been sustaining him fairly well so far, but one can’t expect that to last forever.

Plus he has to pee.

Ed gets in line to acquire some more sweet, sweet caffeine for them while Roy avails himself of the facilities. Ed has claimed a little table by the window by the time that Roy reemerges from the bathroom. Ed is looking out at—or, more likely, past—the bland, eerily familiar suburban parking lot. All strip malls look the same. Liminal space. America is haunted.

“What do you think of it?” Ed asks without turning away from the window as Roy slides into the chair across from him.

“The Starbucks cost-to-quality ratio?” Roy asks.

Ed smiles at him now. “No, I mean—well, actually, I really do want to hear that. But I meant Winry getting married.”

“Not much more overpriced and significantly more reliable than all other chain stores with the exception of Philz,” Roy says. He hesitates. He feels that that’s fair, but he hopes that Ed won’t misinterpret the reason. “I think that if they believe they’re ready, and they believe that it’s the next logical step in their relationship, then it’s a good thing. And if she’s happy, then I’m happy for her.”

“Me, too,” Ed says, looking out the window again. He taps one fingernail on the tabletop; Roy doesn’t think he knows he’s doing it. “Just… I dunno. They’ve been together for, like, a couple of years now. If it’d been much longer, I would’ve had to shove him up against a wall and demand to know why she wasn’t good enough to propose to. But now that he’s done it, I just kinda feel like I don’t know him well enough to be sure that it _is_ good. You know? I like him. But I don’t know… if he’s… right. I don’t know if he’ll stick around no matter how hard it gets. I don’t know if he knows how to make her feel better when shit gets bad, or if he reads her moods, or if he likes her baking. She’s the one who got Al started, y’know, so that’s who to blame next time we eat too many cupcakes and get sick.”

“A terrible fate,” Roy says. “I weep for us.”

“Same,” Ed says. He darts another glance at Roy. “Like—I trust Winry to make decisions for her own life. I do. She’s smart as hell, and she knows what she’s worth, and she doesn’t compromise. She must think this guy’s the bee’s knees. But it’s just… people…” He chews on his lip, considers the window again— “People are fucked up. They hide. They lie. They change. They mess with you. They mess up. I’d trust Winry with anything, but I don’t trust anybody with _her_.”

A strange part of Roy notes idly that it’s probably a good thing that Al is utterly uninterested in romantic attachments, because if Ed’s standards for Winry’s partners are this high, the ones for Al’s would be _impossible_.

“We could vet him,” Roy says. “Invite them over more often. Sneak in little tests of his character. Maybe take them up on a trip one of these days. See how _he_ reacts to mountain lions.”

“Mountain lion veto,” Ed says. “I’m convinced we used up all our cougar luck escaping once. I’m not gonna tempt fate with that one again. Rest of it—” He grins. “Y’know, a normal person probably would’ve said, ‘Nah, he’s all right, stop worrying about it.’”

“How fortunate,” Roy says, “that I’m not a normal person.”

“You’re damn right,” Ed says. “Can’t wait to put this guy through the wringer.”

“There’s always the bachelor party, too,” Roy says. “As a last-second assessment. Given the way that his family seems to throw money around, it’ll probably be in Vegas, and courtesy will require him to invite you. You’ll have a front-row seat to several days of the world’s worst temptations.”

Ed grimaces. Roy loves him. “Yeah, I sure do love…” He looks down and pretends to squint at some imaginary writing on the palm of his hand. “…strippers. And overpriced drinks. And feeding my hard-earned money into a fancy vending machine that doesn’t even give me a bag of chips.”

“Yeah,” Roy says, leaning back in his chair. “Especially since I strip for you for free.”

Ed chokes on his next breath, but before Roy can reach out or express alarm, the barista at the counter calls, “Latte with two extra shots for Babycakes?”

Ed is choking on laughter by the time Roy turns towards him again.

“Well?” Ed manages, eyes gleaming with the strangled-out tears, voice underscored with a wheeze. “Aren’t you gonna go get your drink?”

“I adore you,” Roy says, pushing his chair back. “Also, this means war.”

  


* * *

  


He suspects that Ed will expect him to play a long game—probably waiting until the next time that they go out for coffee or to a restaurant and then picking a name for Ed’s order that’s several times worse.

Ed underestimates Roy’s talent for revenge. It’s not Ed’s fault; he’s never incurred its wrath before.

Ed laughs the first time that “Take On Me” plays over the car stereo.

He laughs the second time it plays.

The third time, he looks at Roy for a long, long moment, and then he says, “Wait.”

The fourth time, as Roy starts singing along without much regard for key or tone or pitch or much of anything other than volume, Ed says, “Okay! Okay! I’m sorry!”

“Tough cookies,” Roy says.

Ed makes a point of plastering himself up against the car door like he’s trying to escape. “How many more?”

“I forget,” Roy says, which is the truth.

  


* * *

  


As it turns out, Roy put it on this playlist seven times in total.

By then, even Roy thinks that it’s a mercy to be free of the synthesizer riff, but he also knows that he’s _won_ , and that matters more than his dignity, his eardrums, and the prospect of having a-ha’s meme-revived one-hit wonder stuck in his head for the rest of his natural life.

The sigh of relief that leaves Ed when another song comes on—not even another catchy eighties song, because there is, evidently, at least one merciful bone in Roy’s body—is so deep and so genuine that Roy’s chest aches sympathetically.

“Hey,” Ed says. “Remind me never to start a prank war with you ever again.”

Roy grins at the road ahead of them. “Yes, sir.”

“I thought we were havin’ a knife fight,” Ed says. “You brought a _bazooka_.”

“I’m sorry,” Roy says, but he can’t stop smiling. His cheeks hurt.

“You are _not_ ,” Ed says. “And you shouldn’t be. That was a stroke of evil fucking genius.” He settles in his seat and folds his arms across his chest. “It’s pretty hot, actually.”

Roy swallows hard and keeps his cool by force: he arches an eyebrow and tilts his smile into a smirk. “Oh? Are you into that?”

“Well,” Ed says, “nothing says _sexy_ quite like that sixth iteration of ‘Take On Me’.”

“Clearly,” Roy says. “My master plan is flawless.”

“What comes on next?” Ed asks. “‘Rasputin’? ‘Cottoneye Joe’? ‘Africa’?”

“Alexa, this is so hot,” Roy says. “Play ‘Despacito’.”

Ed laughs so brightly that Roy’s heart lights up with it.

  


* * *

  


It’s well past dark and well past dinnertime when they finally pull into the parking garage underneath their apartment complex.

“Al missed us,” Ed says, typing at his text log.

“Is he sick?” Roy asks.

Ed hums agreement. “Or bored. He says he’ll make us dinner if we want.”

“Why do I feel like I’m selling my soul?” Roy asks.

“Because you know Al,” Ed says. “He says that the only payment is that he wants to know our thoughts on how we’re gonna interrogate that guy to make sure he’s good enough for Winry.”

“That’s what the ones who want your soul always say,” Roy says.

“I know,” Ed says. “He also says that he’s bringing the cat.”

“Ah,” Roy says. He pulls the parking brake, stretches, and unbuckles his seatbelt before realizing that he should have done the last two in the opposite order. “Well, I’m in. I wasn’t using that soul anyway.”

“Shut up,” Ed says.

They pry themselves out of the seats, and Roy tries to shake the stiffness out of his limbs and not be too obvious about making sure that both of Ed’s legs are cooperating after so long in the car.

Maybe someday he’ll have the guts to say the things he thinks—the things like _I’m never worried about the state of my soul these days, because you’re its keeper, and I trust you with so much more than that._

“Does Al want to move in?” Roy asks. “Or I guess we’d have to move in with him, or move somewhere else.” Their lease doesn’t allow pets on a permanent basis, although it naïvely failed to mention fuzzy visitors: Ed made sure of it. “It seems inefficient for him to have to bring food over all the time, and unfair that he buys more than his own portion si—”

“No,” Ed says, a touch more sharply than it deserves. By the time Roy’s done blinking, he’s slung his backpack over his shoulder and started for the elevator with a scowl.

Roy locks the car and takes a few long, quick strides to catch up with him, trying to search his face. “I… thought you might like that idea. I’m s—”

“I love that idea,” Ed says, jaw still set in a hard line. “Except for the part where, between my angel brother and the nosy-ass cat, we’d never be able to fuck on the living room floor in peace _ever again_.”

Roy casts around for words. There aren’t any. The elevator dings. They shuffle on it together, and Ed jams a fingertip against the button for their floor.

“Well,” Roy manages after several attempts, “in that case, we should… we should probably make use of that privilege. As often as possible. You know. Just to make sure that you don’t have any regrets.”

“I don’t,” Ed says, rocking back on his heels. “I don’t regret a minute of it since we started this whole thing.” He glances up at Roy. “You know that, right?”

Roy’s still kissing him when they reach their floor, and the elevator dings again.


End file.
